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Back to the Street
without Joy: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam and Other Small Wars
Parameters - Summer
2004
by Robert M. Cassidy
“The
deplorable experience in Vietnam overshadows American thinking
about guerrilla insurgency.”
—
Anthony James Joes1
“Fools
say they learn from experience; I prefer to learn from the experience
of others.”
—
Otto von Bismark2
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.
The US military has had a host of
successful experiences in counter-guerrilla war, including some distinct
successes with certain aspects of the Vietnam War. However, the paradox
stemming from America’s unsuccessful crusade in the jungles of Vietnam is
this—because the experience was perceived as anathema to the mainstream
American military, hard lessons learned there about fighting guerrillas
were neither embedded nor preserved in the US Army’s institutional memory.
The American military culture’s efforts to expunge the specter of Vietnam,
embodied in the mantra “No More Vietnams,” also prevented the US Army as
an institution from really learning from those lessons. In fact, even the
term “counterinsurgency” seemed to become a reviled and unwelcome word,
one that the doctrinal cognoscenti of the 1980s conveniently
transmogrified into “foreign internal defense.” Even though many lessons
exist in the US military’s historical experience with small wars, the
lessons from the Vietnam War were the most voluminous. Yet these lessons
were most likely the least read, because the Army’s intellectual rebirth
after Vietnam focused almost exclusively on a big conventional war in
Europe—the scenario preferred by the US military culture.3
Since the US Army and its coalition
partners are currently prosecuting counter-guerrilla wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, it is useful to revisit the lessons from Vietnam and other
counterinsurgencies because they are germane to the wars of today and
tomorrow. Capturing all or many of these lessons is beyond the scope of
this article and is most likely beyond the scope of a single-volume book.
However, this article aims to distill some of the more relevant
counterinsurgency lessons from the American military’s experiences during
Vietnam and before. A bigger goal of this article, however, is to
highlight some salient studies for professional reading as the US Army
starts to inculcate a mindset that embraces the challenges of
counterinsurgency and to develop a culture that learns from past lessons
in counterinsurgency. This analysis also offers a brief explanation of US
military culture and the hitherto embedded cultural obstacles to learning
how to fight guerrillas. To simplify and clarify at the outset, the terms
counterinsurgency, counter-guerrilla warfare, small war, and asymmetric
conflict are used interchangeably. It is a form of warfare in which
enemies of the regime or occupying force aim to undermine the regime by
employing classical guerrilla tactics.4
The US Army and the broader American
military are only now, well into the second decade after the end of the
Cold War, wholeheartedly trying to transform their culture, or mindset.
Senior civilian and military leaders of the defense establishment realize
that military cultural change is a precondition for innovative and
adaptive approaches to meet the exigencies of a more complex security
landscape, one in which our adversaries will most likely adopt unorthodox
strategies and tactics to undermine our technological overmatch in the
Western, orthodox, way of war. Military culture can generally be defined
as the embedded beliefs and attitudes within a military organization that
shape that organization’s preference on when and how the military
instrument should be used. Because these institutional beliefs sometimes
tend to value certain roles and marginalize others, military culture can
impede innovation in ways of warfare that lie outside that organization’s
valued, or core, roles.5
For most of the 20th century, the US
military culture (notwithstanding the Marines’ work in small wars)
generally embraced the big conventional war paradigm and fundamentally
eschewed small wars and insurgencies. Thus, instead of learning from our
experiences in Vietnam, the Philippines, the Marine Corps’ experience in
the Banana Wars, and the Indian campaigns, the US Army for most of the
last 100 years has viewed these experiences as ephemeral anomalies and
aberrations—distractions from preparing to win big wars against other big
powers. As a result of marginalizing the counterinsurgencies and small
wars that it has spent most of its existence prosecuting, the US
military’s big-war cultural preferences have impeded it from fully
benefiting—studying, distilling, and incorporating into doctrine—from our
somewhat extensive lessons in small wars and insurgencies. This article
starts by briefly examining some of the salient lessons for
counterinsurgency from Vietnam and lists some of the sources for lessons
from that war that have been neglected or forgotten. This article also
examines some sources and lessons of counterinsurgencies and small wars
predating Vietnam.
Vietnam—The “Other War” and Valuable
Lessons
If and when most Americans think about
Vietnam, they probably think of General William C. Westmoreland, the
Americanization of the war that was engendered by the big-unit battles of
attrition, and the Tet Offensive of 1968. However, there was another
war—counterinsurgency and pacification—where many Special Forces, Marines,
and other advisers employed small-war methods with some success. Moreover,
when General Creighton Abrams became the commander of the war in Vietnam
in 1968, he put an end to the two-war approach by adopting a one-war focus
on pacification. Although this came too late to regain the political
support for the war that was irrevocably squandered during the
Westmoreland years, Abrams’ unified strategy to clear and hold the
countryside by pacifying and securing the population met with much
success.
Abrams based his approach on a study
prepared by the Army staff in 1966 that was entitled A Program for the
Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam (PROVN Study).
The experiences of the Special Forces in organizing Civilian Irregular
Defense Groups (CIDG), the Marines’ Combined Action Program (CAP), and
Abrams’ PROVN Study-based expansion of the Civil Operations and
Revolutionary (later Rural) Development and Support (CORDS) pacification
effort under Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) all offer some
valuable lessons for current and future counterinsurgencies.6
For much of the Vietnam War, the 5th
Special Forces Group trained and led CIDG mobile strike forces and
reconnaissance companies that comprised ethnic minority tribes and groups
from the mountain and border regions. These strike forces essentially
conducted reconnaissance by means of small-unit patrols and defended their
home bases in the border areas, denying them to the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese regular units. What’s more, during 1966-67 American field
commanders increasingly employed Special Forces-led “Mike” units in
long-range reconnaissance missions or as economy-of-force security
elements for regular units. Other CIDG-type forces, called mobile
guerrilla forces, raided enemy base areas and employed hit-and-run
guerrilla tactics against regular enemy units. The Special Forces also
recruited heavily among the Nung tribes for “Delta,” “Sigma,” and “Omega”
units— Special Forces-led reconnaissance and reaction forces. To be sure,
the CIDG program provided a significant contribution to the war effort.
The approximately 2,500 soldiers assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group
essentially raised and led an army of 50,000 tribal fighters to operate in
some of the most difficult and dangerous terrain in Vietnam. The CIDG
patrolling of border infiltration areas provided reliable tactical
intelligence, and the units secured populations in areas that might have
been otherwise conceded to the enemy.7
Another program that greatly improved the
US military’s capacity to secure the population and to acquire better
tactical intelligence was the US Marine Corps’ Combined Action Program
(CAP). The CAP was a local innovation with potential strategic impact—it
coupled a Marine rifle squad with a platoon of local indigenous forces and
positioned this combined-action platoon in the village of those local
forces. This combined Marine/indigenous platoon trained, patrolled,
defended, and lived in the village together. The mission of the CAP was to
destroy the Viet Cong infrastructure within the village or hamlet area of
responsibility; protect public security and help maintain law and order;
protect friendly infrastructure; protect bases and communications within
the villages and hamlets; organize indigenous intelligence nets;
participate in civic action; and conduct propaganda against the Viet Cong.
Civic action played an important role in efforts to destroy the Viet Cong,
as it acquired important intelligence about enemy activity from the local
population. Because of the combined-action platoon’s proximity to the
76/77
people and because it protected the people
from reprisals, it was ideal for gaining intelligence from the locals. The
Marines’ emphasis on pacifying the highly populated areas prevented the
guerrillas from coercing the local population into providing rice,
intelligence, and sanctuary to the enemy. The Marines would clear and hold
a village in this way and then expand the secured area. The CAP units
accounted for 7.6 percent of the enemy killed while representing only 1.5
percent of the Marines in Vietnam. The lessons from CAP provide one model
for protracted counterinsurgencies, because the program employed US troops
and leadership in an economy of force while maximizing indigenous troops.
A modest investment of US forces at the village level can yield major
improvements in local security and intelligence.8
Although CORDS was integrated under MACV
when Abrams was still the Deputy Commander in 1967, it was Abrams and
William Colby, as the Director of CORDS, who expanded and invested CORDS
with good people and resources. Under the one-war strategy, CORDS was
established as the organization under MACV to unify and provide single
oversight of the pacification effort. After 1968, Abrams and Colby made
CORDS and pacification the main effort. The invigorated civil and rural
development program provided increased support, advisers, and funding to
the police and territorial forces (regional forces and popular forces).
Essentially, this rural development allowed military and civilian US
Agency for International Development advisers to work with their
Vietnamese counterparts at the province and village level to improve local
security and develop infrastructure. Identifying and eliminating the Viet
Cong infrastructure was a critical part of the new focus on pacification,
and Colby’s approach—the Accelerated Pacification Campaign—included the
Phuong Hoang program, or Phoenix. The purpose of Phoenix was to neutralize
the Viet Cong infrastructure, and although the program received some
negative attention in the instances when it was abused, its use of former
Viet Cong and indigenous Provisional Reconnaissance Units to root out the
enemy’s shadow government was very effective. The CORDS’ Accelerated
Pacification Campaign focused on territorial security, neutralizing Viet
Cong infrastructure, and supporting programs for self-defense and
self-government at the local level.9
The Accelerated Pacification Campaign began
in November 1968, and by late 1970 the government of the Republic of
Vietnam controlled most of the countryside. The “other
war”—pacification—had essentially been won. “Four million members of the
People’s Self-Defense Force, armed with some 600,000 weapons” constituted
a powerful example of the commitment of the population in support of the
Republic of Vietnam and in opposition to the enemy. Expanded, better
advised, and better armed, the Regional Forces and Popular Forces
represented the most significant improvement. Under CORDS, these forces
became capable of providing close-in security for the rural population.
The Hamlet Evaluation System, though imperfect and quantitative, indicated
that from 1969 to 1970, 2,600 hamlets (three million people) had been
secured. Other more practical measures of the Accelerated Pacification
Campaign’s success were a reduction in the extortion of taxes by the Viet
Cong, a reduction in recruiting by the enemy in South Vietnam, and a
decrease in enemy food provisions taken from the villagers.
In addition to the MACV and CORDS
pacification efforts, other factors contributed to South Vietnam’s control
of the countryside. First, the enemy’s Tet Offensive in January 1968 and
Mini-Tet in May 1968 resulted in devastating losses to Viet Cong forces in
the south, allowing MACV/CORDS to intensify pacification. Second, the
enemy’s brutal methods (including mass murder in Hue) during Tet shocked
the civilian population of South Vietnam, creating a willingness to accept
the more aggressive conscription required to expand indigenous forces.
Last, one can surmise that Ho Chi Minh’s death in September 1969 may have
had some negative effect on the quality and direction of the North
Vietnamese army’s leadership.10
In and of themselves, the CIDG, CAP, and
CORDS programs met with success in prosecuting key aspects of the
counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Each program expanded the quality and
quantity of the forces conducting pacification and counterinsurgency,
improved the capacity for dispersed small-unit patrolling, and
consequently improved the scope and content of actionable intelligence.
One can only postulate, counterfactually, how the war might have gone if
both CAP and CIDG had been harmonized and unified under CORDS and MACV,
with Colby and Abrams at the helm, back in 1964. Ironically, Abrams had
been on the short list of those considered for the MACV command in 1964.
The lessons and successes of these programs are salient today because in
both Afghanistan and Iraq, improving the quantity and capabilities of
indigenous forces, ensuring that there is an integrated and unified
civil-military approach, and the security of the population all continue
to be central goals.11
None of these Vietnam-era programs,
however, was without problems. The CIDG program was plagued by two
persistent flaws. First, continuous hostility between the South Vietnamese
and the ethnic minority groups who comprised CIDG strike forces impeded
the US efforts to have Republic of Vietnam (RVN) Special Forces take over
the CIDG program. Second, partly as a consequence of that, 5th Special
Forces Group failed to develop an effective indigenous counterpart
organization to lead the CIDG—the RVN Special Forces proved ineffective in
this role. Moreover, US Marines themselves who have written studies that
generally laud the benefits of the CAP model also reveal that the
combined-action platoons were not all completely effective. In some
instances the effects of CAP “were transitory at best” because the
villagers became dependent on the Marines for security. In other
instances, especially before General Abrams ushered-in a new emphasis on
training popular forces, the local militia’s poor equipment and training
made them miserably incapable of defending the villages without the
Marines. As for CORDS, the one major problem with rural development was
that until 1967 it was not integrated under MACV, which seriously
undermined any prospect of actually achieving unity of effort and unity of
purpose. Abrams’ influence resolved this by allowing MACV to oversee CORDS
as well as regular military formations.12
Three works written during or about the
Vietnam era are highly relevant to fighting counterinsurgencies: The
Guerrilla and How to Fight Him, edited by Lieutenant Colonel T. N.
Greene; the US Army’s 1966 PROVN Study; and Lewis Sorley’s A Better War,
published in 1999. The Guerrilla and How to Fight Him is a great
single-volume compendium on the nature and theory of guerrilla warfare.
The most germane chapter in the book is “The Theory and the Threat,” which
includes a primer on guerrilla warfare by Mao; an analysis of Mao, time,
space, and will by Edward Katzenbach; and a section on guerrilla warfare
by Peter Paret and John Shy. This book also includes two sections on why
the French lost the first Indochina War, one written by Vo Nguyen Giap and
the other by Bernard Fall. The PROVN Study and A Better War offer
valuable insights on pacification and the command and control required for
integrating the civil and military efforts in counterinsurgency. A
Better War is the shorter and more readable of the two, but the
executive summary, the “resume,” and Chapter V of the PROVN Study merit
reading because this analysis formed the foundation of the approach
explained in A Better War.
Lessons from Counterinsurgencies
Before Vietnam
Before Vietnam, both the Army and the
Marine Corps had much experience fighting guerrilla-style opponents. The
Army seemed to learn anew for each counterinsurgency, while the Marines
codified their corpus of experience in the 1940 Small Wars Manual.
In fact, the Marines’ lessons from leading Nicaraguan Guardia Nacional
indigenous patrols in counter-guerrilla operations against Sandino’s
guerrillas may very well have served as the basis from which to design
their CAP model in Vietnam. Nonetheless, there are a host of good works
and lessons from the Banana Wars, from the Philippine Insurrection, and
from the Indian Wars. This section encapsulates some of the common lessons
from these wars and recommends some key books that cover them. The
Hukbulahap Rebellion in the Philippines following World War II is excluded
because the US role there was essentially limited to providing money and
the advice of Edward Lansdale.
From the Marines’ experience in Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua during the first part of the 20th
century, they learned that small wars, unlike conventional wars, present
no defined or linear battle area and theater of operations. While delay in
the use of force may be interpreted as weakness, the Small Wars Manual
maintains, the brutal use of force is not appropriate either. “In
small wars, tolerance, sympathy, and kindness should be the keynote to our
relationship with the mass of the population.” For small wars, the manual
urges US forces to employ as many indigenous troops as practical early on
to confer proper responsibility on indigenous agencies for restoring law
and order. Moreover, it stresses the importance of focusing on the social,
economic, and political development of the people more than on simple
material destruction. It also underscores the importance of aggressive
patrolling, population security, and the denial of sanctuary to the
insurgents. An overarching principle, though, is not to fight small wars
with big-war methods—the goal is to gain results with the least
application of force and minimum loss of civilian (non-combatant) life.
The 1940 Small Wars Manual and the
draft of its 2004 addendum, Small Wars, are the best sources for
distilling the Marines’ lessons from the Banana Wars and beyond. While the
logistical and physical aspects of the 1940 manual have become obsolete,
the portions that address the fundamentals and principles of small wars
are still quite relevant. One indication of this manual’s continued
relevance is the fact that the 2004 draft, Small Wars, is not
intended to supplant the earlier version but to complement it by linking
it to the 21st century.13
During the Philippine insurgency, the
American military won a relatively bloodless but unambiguous victory in
three and a half years in a way that established the basis for a future
friendship between Americans and Filipinos. Anthony James Joes, a scholar
on American and guerrilla warfare, succinctly explains why:
There were no screaming jets accidentally
bombing helpless villages, no B-52s, no napalm, no artillery barrages, no
collateral damage. Instead, the Americans conducted a decentralized war of
small mobile units armed mainly with rifles and aided by native Filipinos,
hunting guerrillas who were increasingly isolated both by the indifference
or hostility of much of the population and by the concentration of
scattered peasant groups into larger settlements.14
During the Philippine Insurrection from
1899 to 1902, the US military learned to avoid big-unit search and destroy
missions because they were counterproductive; to maximize the employment
of indigenous scouts and paramilitary forces to increase and sustain
decentralized patrolling; to mobilize popular support by focusing on the
improvement of schools, hospitals, and infrastructure; and to enhance
regime legitimacy by allowing insurgents and former insurgents to organize
anti-regime political parties. In Savage Wars of Peace, an
award-winning study on America’s role in small wars, Max Boot attributed
American success in the Philippine Insurrection to a balanced and sound
application of sticks and carrots: the US military used aggressive
patrolling and force to pursue and crush insurgents; it generally treated
captured rebels well; and it generated goodwill among the population by
running schools and hospitals, and by improving sanitation. In addition to
Boot’s book, America and Guerrilla Warfare by Anthony James Joes
and America’s Forgotten Wars by Sam C. Sarkesian both offer
insightful chapters on US military counterinsurgency methods in the
Philippines.15
Sarkesian writes:
There is a need to learn from history,
analyze American involvement and the nature of low-intensity conflict, and
translate these into strategy and operational doctrines. Without some
sense of historical continuity, Americans are likely to relearn the
lessons of history each time they are faced with a low-intensity conflict.16
When Brigadier General Jack Pershing
returned to the Philippines to serve as military governor of the Moro
Province between 1909 and 1913, he applied the lessons he had learned as a
captain during the Philippine Insurrection to pacify the Moros. He
established the Philippine Constabulary, comprising loyal Filipinos from
the main islands and serving as a police force, to assist in the campaign
to pacify the Moros. Pershing did not attempt to apply military force
alone to suppress the Moro rebellion. “Pershing felt that an understanding
of Moro customs and habits was essential in successfully dealing with
them—and he went to extraordinary lengths to understand Moro society and
culture.” Pershing understood the imperative of having American forces
involved at the grass-roots level. He also comprehended the
social-political aspects and knew that military goals sometimes had to be
subordinated to them. “He scattered small detachments of soldiers
throughout the interior, to guarantee peaceful existence of those tribes
that wanted to raise hemp, produce timber, or farm.” To influence and win
the people, there had to be contact between them and his soldiers. During
his first tour there as a captain, he was allowed inside the “Forbidden
Kingdom” and as an honor not granted to any other white man, he was made a
Moro Datu.17
More removed in time and context, the
Indian Wars of the 19th century nonetheless provide some lessons for
counterinsurgency. These lessons also demonstrate that the overarching
fundamentals for fighting small wars are indeed timeless. With little
preserved institutional memory and less codified doctrine for
counterinsurgency, the late-19th-century US Army had to adapt on the fly
to Indian tactics. A loose body of principles emerged from the Indian
Wars: to ensure the close civil-military coordination of the pacification
effort, to provide firm but fair and paternalistic governance, and to
reform the economic and educational spheres. Good treatment of prisoners,
attention to the Indians’ grievances, and the avoidance of killing woman
and children (learned by error) were also regarded as fundamental to any
long-term solution. Additionally, General George Crook developed the
tactic of inserting small teams from friendly Apache tribes into the
sanctuaries of insurgent Apaches to neutralize them, to psychologically
unhinge them, and to sap their will. This technique subsequently emerged
in one form or another in the Philippines, during the Banana Wars, and
during the Vietnam War.18
One of the better books on the US Army’s
role in counter-guerrilla warfare against the Indians is Andrew J.
Birtle’s U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations
Doctrine 1860-1941. It includes some interesting and relevant sections
entitled “Indian Warfare and Military Thought,” “U.S. Army
Counter-guerrilla Operations on the Western Frontier,” and “The Army and
Indian Pacification.” Birtle describes one of the few manuals published
during the era on how to operate on the Plains, The Prairie Traveler,
as “perhaps the single most important work on the conduct of frontier
expeditions published under the aegis of the War Department.” Captain
Randolph Marcy’s The Prairie Traveler was a “how-to” manual for
packing, traveling, tracking, and bivouacking on the Plains. More
important, it was also a primer on fighting the Indians.
In formulating principles for pacification,
Marcy looked at his own experiences on the frontier as well as the French
and Turkish experiences conducting pacification operations in North Africa
to arrive at three lessons: over-dispersion strips the counterinsurgent
force of initiative, increases its vulnerability, and saps its morale;
mobility is an imperative (mounting infantry on mules was one way of
increasing mobility during that era); and the best way to counter an
elusive guerrilla was to employ mobile mounted forces at night to surprise
the enemy at dawn. However, The Prairie Traveler conveys one
central message that is still salient and germane today: it urges soldiers
to be adaptive by coupling conventional discipline with the self-reliance,
individuality, and rapid mobility of the insurgent.19
A Mindset for Winning the “War of the
Flea”
In The War of the Flea: Guerrilla
Warfare in Theory and Practice, author Robert Taber wrote:
Analogically, the guerrilla fights the war
of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog’s disadvantages: too
much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips
with. If the war continues long enough—this is the theory—the dog succumbs
to exhaustion and anemia without ever having found anything on which to
close its jaws or to rake with its claws.20
The “war of the flea” is harder than
fighting against enemies who opt, imprudently, to fight the US military
according to the conventional paradigm it has historically preferred and
in which it is unequaled. Our current and future adversaries in the
protracted war on terror are fighting—and will continue to fight—the “war
of the flea.” Employing hit-and-run ambushes, they strive to turn
Coalition lines of communication and friendly regime key roads into
“streets without joy.” However, the lessons from previous US military
successes in fighting the elusive guerrilla show that with the right
mindset and with some knowledge of the aforementioned methods, the war of
the flea is in fact winnable.
The US Army is adapting in contact,
learning and capturing lessons anew for beating the guerrilla. As it
transforms and develops a mindset that places much more emphasis on
stability operations and counterinsurgency, the books listed in this
article are ones that should appear on reading lists and in the curricula
of professional schools, beginning with the basic courses.
NOTES
1. Anthony James Joes, America and
Guerrilla Warfare (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 325.
2. Cited in Samuel B. Griffith II,
“Guerrilla, Part I,” Marine Corps Gazette, July 1950, p. 43.
3. For an explanation of this rebirth, see
Robert M. Cassidy, “Prophets or Praetorians: The Uptonian Paradox and the
Powell Corollary,” Parameters, 33 (Autumn 2003), 132-33.
4. For a lengthier explanation of
counterinsurgency, small war, or asymmetric conflict, see Robert M.
Cassidy, “Why Great Powers Fight Small Wars Badly,” Military Review,
82 (September-October 2002), 43. For a definition of guerrilla insurgency,
see Joes, p. 333.
5. For a short discussion on military
culture and big-war preferences, see Robert M. Cassidy, Russia in
Afghanistan and Chechnya: Military Strategic Culture and the Paradoxes of
Asymmetric Conflict (Carlisle, Pa.: US Army War College, Strategic
Studies Institute, 2003), pp. 8, 54-60.
6. US Department of the Army, A Program
for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam
(Washington: Department of the Army, 1966), pp. 1-9; and Lewis Sorley,
A Better War (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), pp. 10-125. Some
analysis in this article derives from a briefing produced by the USAREUR
Commanding General’s Initiatives Group (CIG). The briefing was distributed
to USAREUR units in Iraq in December 2003.
7. Jeffrey J. Clarke, Advice and
Support: The Final Years (Washington: US Army Center of Military
History, 1988), pp. 196-207.
8. Frank Pelli, “Insurgency,
Counterinsurgency, and the Marines in Vietnam,” unpublished paper, USMC
Command and Staff College, Quantico, Va., 1990, pp. 13-16; and Brooks R.
Brewington, “Combined Action Platoons: A Strategy for Peace Enforcement,”
unpublished paper, USMC Command and Staff College, Quantico, Va., 1996,
pp. 13-19.
9. Sorley, pp. 22-23, 64-67.
10. Ibid., pp. 64-67, 72-73, 217-24.
11. Ibid., p. 1.
12. Clarke, p. 207; Keith F. Kopets, “The
Combined Action Program: Vietnam,” Military Review, 82 (July-August
2002), 78-79.
13. US Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual
(Washington: GPO, 1940), pp. 1-1 to 1-31; Marine Corps Combat Development
Command, Small Wars (Draft) (Quantico, Va.: US Marine Corps, 2004),
pp. iii-iv; and Max Boot, “A Century of Small Wars Shows They Can be Won,”
New York Times Week in Review, 6 July 2003.
14. Joes, pp. 120-23.
15. Max Boot, Savage Wars of Peace:
Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books,
2003), p. 126.
16. Sam C. Sarkesian, America’s
Forgotten Wars: The Counterrevolutionary Past and Lessons for the Future
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 245.
17. Ibid., pp. 178-80.
18. Andrew J. Birtle, U.S. Army
Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine 1860-1941
(Washington: US Army Center of Military History, 1988), pp. 55-92.
19. Ibid., pp. 64-66.
20. Robert Taber, The War of the Flea:
Guerrilla Warfare in Theory and Practice (New York: Lyle Stuart,
1965), pp. 27-28.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Cassidy is a
member of the US Army, Europe, Commanding General’s Initiatives Group, in
Heidelberg, Germany. He is a graduate of Fitchburg State College
(Massachusetts), and holds an M.A. from Boston University and M.A.L.D. and
Ph.D. degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He has served
in various leadership and staff positions, including S3, 4th Aviation
Brigade, 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized), in Operation Iraqi Freedom,
and as troop commander, 1-17 Cavalry, 82d Airborne Division.
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