In researching the Algerian war for independence, I came across a research paper with profound observations about insurgency movements.
Its here
Sadly, it was written in 1965 and like Cassandra, ignored by our political and military leaders of the time. In hindsight, the author appears clairvoyant. However, the reality is that the historical signals were there to interpret then, and even more so now. We ignore the lessons and signals at our peril.
It takes atrocities killing hundreds of Iraqis to make much news, but the simple murders and other acts of terror being inflicted on the population are far more significant than Mr. Cheney's "last throes" comment would suggest.
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The author describes revolutionary war as "revolutionary warfare equals guerrilla warfare plus political action"
This formula for revolutionary warfare is the result of the application of guerrilla methods to the furtherance of an ideology or a political system. This is the real difference between partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare, and everything else. "Guerrilla" simply means "small war," to which the correct Army answer is (and that applies to all Western armies) that everybody knows how to fight small wars; no second lieutenant of the infantry ever learns anything else but how to fight small wars. Political action, however, is the difference. The ... sound revolutionary warfare operator (the French underground, the Norwegian underground, or any other European anti-Nazi underground) most of the time used small-war tactics--not to destroy the German Army, of which they were thoroughly incapable, but to establish a competitive system of control over the population. Of course, in order to do this, here and there they had to kill some of the occupying forces and attack some of the military targets. But above all they had to kill their own people who collaborated with the enemy.
Uh oh. Better look at some examples from the past.
One thing that Napoleon also brought with him was French occupation and the first true, modern guerrilla wars against his troops. For example, the word "guerrilla," as we know it, comes from the Spanish uprising against the French. There were similar wars, for example, in Tyrol. The Tyrolians rose up under Andreas Hofer against the French. There were such uprisings in Russia also, although they were in support of an organized military force, the Russian army. In that case we speak of partisan warfare. We also had such things in Germany, the Tugend-Bund, the "Virtue League." This was sort of a Pan-Germanic underground which got its people into the various German states to work for the liberation of the country from French occupation.
Very interestingly we see the difference between Napoleon and some of the other leaders in the field of counterinsurgency. Napoleon tended to make his family members and his cronies kings of those newly created French satellite states. One of his brothers, Joseph, got Spain, and Jerome got Westphalia, a French puppet state cut out in the Rhine area. The population of Westphalia rose up against Jerome. He sent a message to his brother saying, "I'm in trouble." The answer returned was typically Napoleonic. It said, "By God, brother, use your bayonets. (Signed) Bonaparte." A historic message came back from Jerome to his brother saying: "Brother, you can do anything with bayonets--except sit on them." In other words: One can do almost anything with brute force except salvage an unpopular government.
What about those metrics in our war on terror?
The important thing is to know how to discover the symptoms of insurgency. This is where I feel that we are woefully lagging in Viet-Nam. I will show you how badly mistaken one can be in this particular field. For example, I have a Vietnamese briefing sheet in English which the Vietnamese government used to hand out. It is dated 1957 and is called The Fight Against Communist Subversive Activities. At the end of the last page it says: "From this we can see that the Vietminh authorities have disintegrated and been rendered powerless." Famous last words!
Here is a communication by Professor Wesley Fishel, who was the American public police adviser in Viet-Nam in the late 1950s. He said in August 1958, "Indeed, Viet-Nam can be classed as about the most stable and peaceful country in all of Asia today." I would underline the fact that in 1958 the Vietnamese were losing something like three village chiefs a day. But village chiefs were not considered a military target.
When I first arrived in Indochina in 1953, the French were mainly fighting in the Red River Delta. This was the key French area in North Viet-Nam, . . . [with a] fortified French battle line. The French headquarters city was Hanoi. When I arrived I checked in with the French briefing officer and asked what the situation was in the Delta. He said:
Well, we hold pretty much of it; there is the French fortified line around the Delta which we call the "Marshal de Lattre Line"--about 2200 bunkers forming 900 forts. We are going to deny the communists access to the 8 million people in this Delta and the 3 million tons of rice it produces. We will eventually starve them out and deny them access to the population.
In other words, this was the strategic hamlet complex seen five thousand times bigger. There were about 8,000 villages inside that line. This fortified line also protected the rice fields then, whereas now the individual strategic hamlets do not protect the same fields. "Well," I said, "do the communists hold anything inside the Delta?" The answer was, "Yes, they hold those five black blotches" [on a map]. But at the University of Hanoi, which was under national Vietnamese control, my fellow Vietnamese students just laughed. They said that their home villages inside the Delta were communist-controlled and had communist village chiefs, and just about everybody else said the same thing: that both the French and the Vietnamese Army simply did not know what was going on.
Most of these villages were, in fact, controlled by the communists and I decided to attempt to document that control. It was actually very simple. To the last breath a government will try to collect taxes. So I used a working hypothesis; I went to the Vietnamese tax collection office in Hanoi to look at the village tax rolls. They immediately indicated that the bulk of the Delta was no longer paying taxes. As a cross-check on my theory I used the village teachers.
The school teachers in Viet-Nam were centrally assigned by the government. Hence, where there were school teachers the government could be assumed to have control. Where there were none, there was no government control. [I produced a map that showed] the difference between military "control" and what the communists controlled administratively, which was 70 percent of the Delta inside the French battle lines! This was one year before the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, in May 1954. In fact, the [official military situation maps--showing only small, isolated areas believed to be less than 30 percent French-controlled-- were] complete fiction and had absolutely no bearing on the real situation inside the Delta.
The author nexts turns to his experience in South Vietnam
When I returned to Viet-Nam in 1957, after the Indochina War had been over for two years, everybody was telling me that the situation was fine. However, I noticed in the South Vietnamese press obituaries of village chiefs, and I was bothered. I thought there were just too many obituaries--about one a day--allegedly killed not by communists, but by "unknown elements," and by "bandits." I decided to plot out a year's worth of dead village officials. The result was that I counted about 452 dead village chiefs to my knowledge at that time. Then I also saw in the press, and here and there in Viet-Nam heard, discussions about "bandit attacks." These attacks were not made at random, but in certain areas. That too worried me, so I decided to plot the attacks. I immediately noted in both cases a very strange pattern. The attacks on the village chiefs were "clustered" in certain areas.
In 1959 the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization gave me a research grant to do a study on communist infiltration in the area. . . . One of the results of the study: Saigon was deliberately encircled and cut off from the hinterland with a "wall" of dead village chiefs. President Kennedy, in his second State of the Union message on May 25, 1961, stated that during the past year (meaning April 1960-61) the communists killed 4,000 minor officials in Viet-Nam! This was one year before the [Maxwell] Taylor Report which got the whole American major effort going. In other words, in 1960 and 1961 the communists killed 11 village officials a day. By the time we woke up and learned that we had a problem, the communists had killed about 10,000 village chiefs in a country that has about 16,000 villages. This, gentlemen, is "control"--not the military illusion of it.
What we are faced with precisely is a communist, military-backed operation to take over a country under our feet. I would like to put it in even a simpler way: When a country is being subverted it is not being outfought; it is being out-administered. Subversion is literally administration with a minus sign in front. This is what I feel has to be clearly understood. Whether it is the Congo, Viet-Nam or Venezuela, is totally irrelevant. Whether we have the "body count," the "kill count," the "structure count," or the "weapons count"--these are almost meaningless considerations in an insurgency situation. We can lose weapons and still win the insurgency. On the other hand, we can win the war and lose the country.
For example:
The French in Algeria learned every lesson from the French in Viet-Nam. The troop ratio there was a comfortable 11-to-1; the French had 760,000 men, the Algerians had 65,000. The French very effectively sealed off the Algerian-Tunisian border, and by 1962 had whittled down the guerrillas from 65,000 to 7,000. But the French were winning at the expense of being the second-most-hated country in the world, after South Africa, in the United Nations. They were giving the whole Western alliance a black name. At what price were the French winning? Well, 760,000 men out of the about 1 million men of the French armed forces were tied down in Algeria. It cost 3 million dollars a day for eight years, or $12 billion in French money. No American aid was involved. The "price" also included two mutinies of the French Army and one overthrow of the civilian government. At that price the French were winning the war in Algeria, militarily. The fact was that the military victory was totally meaningless. This is where the word "grandeur" applies to President de Gaulle: he was capable of seeing through the trees of military victory to a forest of political defeat and he chose to settle the Algerian insurgency by other means.
Some of these wars, of course, can be won, as in the Philippines, for example. The war was won there not through military action (there wasn't a single special rifle invented for the Philippines, let alone more sophisticated ordnance) but through an extremely well-conceived civic action program and, of course, a good leader--[Ramon] Magsaysay.
Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of antimalaria sprays. One can't fight an ideology; one can't fight a militant doctrine with better privies. Yet this is done constantly. One side says, "land reform," and the other side says, "better culverts." One side says, "We are going to kill all those nasty village chiefs and landlords." The other side says, "Yes, but look, we want to give you prize pigs to improve your strain." These arguments just do not match. Simple but adequate appeals will have to be found sooner or later.
Ultimately, I don't see much hope that we will heed the author's advice as it relates to the war in Iraq. Can the Iraqi insurgency destroy the U.S. Army? Of course not. But does the insurgency control certain areas in Iraq? Is it killing Iraqis thought to be collaborating? Unfortunately, the answers are yes.
At this point, the USA appears extremely tired with the war in Iraq. Some politicians are calling for immediate disengagement and many more are calling for a plan that will lead to our withdrawal. Unless we commit vast new levels of troops and material to the war effort, along with a yet unseen level of competent administration, we will not prevail. If we are not going to make that committment (or ideally, get other nations to join us), we ought to withdrawal sooner rather than later.