From the end of World War II, revolutionary insurgency was epidemic in the developing world, driven by an unfortunate conflux of trends and factors. For instance, most Third World governments exercised only limited or ineffective control over parts of their nations. Because of rugged terrain, poor infrastructure, government inefficiency, and tradition, the common pattern was for the influence of the regime to decline according to distance from the capital. The national government was something of an abstraction. As Jeffrey Race noted in his classic study, War Comes to Long An, "for the majority of the Vietnamese population, 'government' has always meant simply the village council-the peasant had little experience of any other." [1] The fragile legitimacy of many Third World regimes also helped set the stage for insurgency. Since many Third World states were artificial creations of colonialism, no national government, however good, would be accepted by all segments of the population. The stress on local or primal identities during the colonial period-part of a deliberate "divide and conquer" approach by the imperial metropolesexacerbated this problem. In Asian and African states where decolonization was peaceful, regimes often found it difficult to build legitimacy because of the taint of association with the colonial masters. Even in regions long independent or autonomous such as Latin America and parts of the Islamic world, repression and corruption by autocratic or traditional regimes eroded government legitimacy. The electronic and transportation revolutions of the 20th century also paved the way for revolutionary insurgency by allowing people in remote regions to develop an accurate sense of their predicament. Before modern communication, the hinterland poor assumed that all the world lived as they did. With the advent of modern communication, they recognized their disadvantages and, more importantly, blamed the government. The result was what social scientists call the "revolution of rising expectations" which simply meant that demands on Third World states tended to grow faster than the government's ability to meet them, thus generating frustration. Empirical studies have closely linked the resulting "perceived relative deprivation" with political violence. [2] Improvements in communication and transportation also gave revolutionaries methods to organize support and allowed them to study and emulate revolutionary success in other parts of the world. At the same time, changes in global values helped legitimize revolutionary violence. Although Americans often forgot it during the Cold War, armed resistance to repression has been an intrinsic part of the Western political tradition, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Reflecting this, the political left in the United States and Western Europe remained sympathetic to Third World revolutionaries fighting repressive regimes. Ironically, the ascendence to superpower status of the United States, with its strong liberal tradition, helped spark global consciousness concerning human rights which, in turn, further legitimized armed resistance to repression. It is not coincidence that Ho Chi Minh cited the American Declaration of Independence during his announcement of the independent Republic of Vietnam in 1945. [3] The French-speaking parts of the Third World also found justification for revolution in their intellectual heritage. The liberating effect of political violence was a recurring theme among French thinkers Rousseau through Georges Sorel. [4] Frantz Fanon, who argued that only violence could psychologically liberate the victims of colonialism, was very influential among Third World radicals. [5] And throughout the 1950s and 1960s the United Nations General Assembly, increasingly dominated by Third World nations recently liberated from colonialism, implicitly and, sometimes, explicitly approved armed struggles which it considered "just." Finally, the existence of an international support network manipulated by the Soviet Union encouraged the spread and persistence of insurgency. Armed opponents otherwise easy for even weak regimes to defeat became serious threats with training, advice, equipment, and sanctuary from the Soviet Union, China, or one of their surrogates. Mao's triumph in 1949, in addition to providing a blueprint for successful revolution, offered potential insurgents proof that even apparently strong, Western-backed regimes could be defeated. Insurgency took a number of forms, some specific to certain regions or countries, others global, but all were attempts to alter the social, political, and economic status quo through violence. In contrast to insurrections or coups d'dtat, insurgencies were characterized by protractedness and broad participation. In essence, insurgent strategists had two tasks: first, strip legitimacy from the regime, and, second, seize it themselves. The precise strategy of an insurgency varied according to its leaders' backgrounds, personalities, and answers to questions concerning the nature and extent of the insurgent coalition, its ideological framework, geographic focus, and the priority accorded the military and political dimensions of the conflict. Of the insurgent strategies that appeared during the Cold War, Maoist "people's war" was undoubtedly the most successful. With the exception of Cuba, nearly all victorious insurgents- Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Guinea Bisseau, Namibia, Algeria-followed some variant of Maoist "people's war." This had several defining characteristics: the primacy of political organization over military operation, the development of extensive political undergrounds and common fronts of "progressive" organizations and movements, protractedness, and emphasis on rural areas. All of these are simple ideas. Why, exactly, was a "people's war" so successful? In part, because it correctly identified and targeted the key vulnerabilities of most Third World regimes: limited legitimacy, weak public support, and shaky control of the hinterlands. Maoist "people's war"was also able to organize the very real, local grievances of Third World peasants into a strategically significant movement. This distinguished "people's war" from the innumerable serf, slave, and peasant rebellions of the past, most of which never transcended their local roots. Maoist "people's war" was successful less because it was truly new or innovative than because it was holistic, integrated, and synchronized while the efforts of the counterinsurgents were sometimes astrategic or, at best, torn by contradictory and counterproductive practices. And, finally, Maoist "people's war" succeeded because it was new. Still, many of the key counterinsurgent powers had dealt with small wars before. The French and British fought insurgent-style opponents during their colonial expansion in Asia and Africa, and the United States had faced guerrillas during the Indian wars and in the Philippines, Mexico, and Nicaragua. [6] Yet this did not immediately translate into proficiency at opposing communist "people's war." After some initial problems, though, the United States came to grips with the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines and the British eventually defeated a Chinese-inspired insurgency in Malaya. [7] The French developed the most elaborate concept of counterinsurgency but had the least success implementing it. Based on their experience in Indochina, the French concluded that counterinsurgency must mirror "people's war." It thus required a careful blend of military, political, and psychological efforts including pro-government propaganda, mobilization of the state's political resources, attacks on the subversive infrastructure, reconquest of liberated zones, isolation and destruction of insurgent military forces, and diplomatic efforts. [8] Similarly, the British stressed strict unity of effort between the military, economic, political, and police forces during counterinsurgency, effective political and psychological operations, and the limited use of firepower in military operations. [9] Initially, neither of these concepts found eager converts in the U.S. military. Rather than use the 1950s to hone their understanding of insurgency, policymakers and senior military leaders ignored the hard-earned wisdom of America's allies and forgot what the United States itself had learned and captured in documents like the Marines' astute Small Wars Manual of 1940. [10] During President Dwight D. Eisenhower's tenure, American national security strategy had been based on "massive retaliation." [11] American superiority in strategic nuclear weapons, he believed, would deter Soviet aggression better and more cheaply than conventional forces. In the 1950s strategic thinkers linked nuclear stalemate and "indirect aggression," but thought this would come as limited conventional war. [12] As a result, Americans trained their Third World allies to confront Korea-style external invasion rather than internal threats. In addition, U.S. conventional forces had declined precipitously after the Korean War, leaving the United States with little to counter guerrilla warfare. Even Army Special Forces, which were created at this time, focused on partisan warfare and unconventional operations in Europe rather than insurgency. To the extent that Third World conflict was a problem, Eisenhower and his national security team felt that the European colonial powers-Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Belgium-would deal with it. Under Kennedy, this changed. Inspired by Khrushchev's January 1961 speech endorsing "wars of national liberation," the eroding security situation in Laos and South Vietnam, the consolidation of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba, the French defeat in Algeria, and the outbreak of communist insurgencies in Colombia and Venezuela, Kennedy was convinced that indirect aggression through guerrilla insurgency had become a paramount security threat. The strategic rationale for U.S. engagement in counterinsurgency thus grew from ideas like the "domino theory" and the notion of "death by a thousand small cuts" advanced by French theorists of guerre revolutionnaire. Revolutionary war, this group believed, was the dominant form of conflict in the late 20th century. A defeat for pro-Western forces even in places that appeared strategically insignificant became important when seen as one more small contribution to global Soviet victory. Metaphorically, at least, the Cold War consisted of interminable skirmishes rather than decisive pitched battles. The strategic significance of insurgency, in other words, was symbolic and perceptual rather than tangible and empirical. Kennedy immediately instigated a wide-ranging program to improve U.S. capabilities. [13] He first formed a Cabinet-level Special Group-the Interdepartmental Committee on Overseas Internal Defense Policy-to lay the groundwork for a unified counterinsurgency strategy and coordinate the disparate elements of the government. [14] The Pentagon established the Office on Counter- Insurgency and Special Activities headed by Major General Victor H. Krulak (USMC) and gave him direct access to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense. [15] The services integrated counterinsurgency into their professional educational systems, and established training centers. Army Special Forces were expanded and reoriented toward counterinsurgency assistance. Even the State Department and Agency for International Development began to take counterinsurgency seriously (albeit with less enthusiasm than the military). [16] Within a year, the Interdepartmental Committee released a basic statement of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy. It stated [17]: The employment of indirect aggression through the use of subversion and insurgency against Free World institutions is related directly to the fact the world is dominated by two over-whelmingly strong centers of power. These power centers tend to become involved directly or indirectly in most of the critical situations that occur throughout the world. They tend at the same time to muffle any violent confrontation so as to avoid escalation to the nuclear level. On the part of the communists, this has resulted in an increased effort to seek their objectives by subversive insurgency rather than overt aggression. Reflecting the theoretical work of Kennedy advisor Walt Rostow, the policy assumed economic "take off" was inherently destabilizing and stressful. [18] Communists, under the leadership of the Soviet Union, exploited this for their own geostrategic ends. The solution was to ameliorate the root causes of the insurgency, to "deal with and eliminate the causes of dissidence and violence." [19] "The U.S. must always keep in mind," wrote the Interdepartmental Committee, "that the ultimate and decisive target is the people. Society itself is at war and the resources, motives and targets of the struggle are found almost wholly within the local population." [20] But the policy stressed that outsiders cannot solve insurgency, and thus the role of the United States should be strictly limited. The United States sought to augment "indigenous capabilities" and seek "the assistance of third countries and international organizations ." [21] The new policy intentionally glossed over what would later became a raging debate between those who focused on the endogenous political and economic causes of the insurgency and those who stressed outside intervention and the military dimensions of the problem. The debate between "root causes" and "military threat" approaches to counterinsurgency grew from the deliberate decision of insurgent strategists to make their struggle neither war nor peace. Western democracies knew how to deal with war and knew how to deal with peace. They were confused, however, by conflicts overlapping and blending the two, by what American policymakers and strategists would later recognize as deliberate ambiguity. When the U.S. military became heavily involved in Vietnam, senior leaders largely ignored the American experience with small wars as well as that of the British and French. From first involvement until the mid 1960s, American advisors sought to augment the conventional military capabilities of the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) in anticipation of a Korea-style war. [22] Even when the true nature of the conflict became clearer, the U.S. Army, in Andrew Krepinevich's words, "was neither trained nor organized to fight effectively in an insurgency conflict environment. [23] With the exception of the Marines and Army Special Forces, the U.S. military was uninterested in the more mundane aspects of counterinsurgency such as training the ARVN, village pacification, local self-defense, or rooting out insurgent political cadres, at least at the higher level. [24] Perhaps more importantly, the United States never forced the South Vietnamese regime to undergo fundamental reform. Army Chief of Staff General Earle G. Wheeler reflected the thinking of Johnson and top advisors when he said, "The essence of the problem in Vietnam is military." [25] Still, inappropriate military techniques in themselves did not lose Vietnam. With a clear, coherent counterinsurgency strategy and a president who understood Marxist "people's war," the U.S. military could have been forced to change. But basic U.S. counterinsurgency strategy contained major flaws. Having never faced major engagement in a serious Maoist "people's war," American policymakers grossly under-estimated the extent and length of commitment that this entailed, and thus became involved in an area with absolutely no U.S. interests beyond the symbolic. The Kennedy policy gave inadequate attention to preparing the American public for engagement in counterinsurgency. In part this was because the Kennedy approach to counterinsurgency eschewed major involvement by the armed forces and stressed advice and assistance. It also grew from Kennedy's confidence in his ability to mobilize public support when necessary. Whatever the cause, the effects were debilitating. Some writers have suggested that Kennedy recognized the mounting problems of U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia and intended to withdraw after the 1964 elections. [26] But Johnson did not and, as popular approval of American involvement lagged, the Vietnamese communists skillfully used a program they called dich van ("action among the enemy") to further weaken public support. [27] The administration offered no effective response. Lyndon Johnson thus inherited a flawed strategy and made it worse by allowing advocates of a military solution-both those in uniform and key civilians like National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara-to win bureaucratic battles over the conduct of the conflict while simultaneously refusing the military the resources it considered necessary for victory. [28] By the time the United States formed an organization to synchronize the military, political, and psychological dimensions of the struggle in 1967--the Civilian Operations and Revolutionary Development Support or CORDS program- it was too late. [29] The Viet Cong political infrastructure was too entrenched, the South Vietnamese regime too corrupt and illegitimate, and the American public too alienated to win the conflict. And even CORDS could not substitute for coherent counterinsurgency strategy. As Phillip B. Davidson noted, the communists won because they had a superior grand strategy. [30] Back to Table of Contents Counterinsurgency Strategy Back to SSI List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1995 by US Army War College. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com