Revisiting COIN Strategies in Vietnam

This post originally appeared in Cicero Magazine 14 July 2014.

That “Generals are always fighting the last war” may be true, but this is often because they are fighting a different war from their opponent. According to Clausewitz, it is key to military strategy to find the “center of gravity” in any war. If one does not, or focuses on the wrong ‘center’, the battles and ultimately the war will be lost. In Vietnam, the United States did not come to recognize the people of Indochina as the center of gravity and focused on them too little and too late. Many post-mortems on the Vietnam War have recognized this fact. Yet in recent conflicts such as Afghanistan and Iraq—despite the battle cry of “hearts and minds”—America still believed it could win through “thunder runs”, “economy of force”, “dynamic maneuver warfare”, and remote or walled combat fortresses. Arguably, these tactics won battles, but they have not won the wars.

Mao’s Teachings

The goal and strategy of indigenous communist forces was related directly to winning over the people of Southeast Asia. They wanted to change society, not just change governments. They sought to communicate this goal to the people and mobilise them to support it, not just build a government and centrally-controlled army to fight pitched battles, though they did show ability to do so against the French and, in later stages, against the United States.

Communist forces devised effective tactics to further their strategy of revolutionary guerrilla warfare largely based upon the teachings of China’s Mao Zedong and Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap. They viewed the wars as a “struggle”—dau tranh—broken further into the “military struggle”—dau tranh vu trang—and the “political struggle”—dau tranh chinh tri. Included in the political struggle was “action among the enemy”—dich van. “Action among the enemy” referred to actions behind enemy lines taken by communist forces among the local population in areas controlled or contested by anti-communist forces. Almost all communist actions conducted in South Vietnam included detailed plans and directives for propagandizing and re-training “liberated citizens”.

The primary and most effective vehicle through which communist forces undertook these actions was the “Agit-Prop Team”, also referred to as the “Armed Propaganda Team” (APT). These teams were first used by the Viet Minh to quickly disseminate news of the 1945 Japanese surrender and standing up of the communist government throughout the countryside—quickly pushed aside byBritish troops. They continued to be employed by communist forces throughout the conflict. Travelling minstrels and drama troupes had been part of Southeast Asian culture for centuries. As retired Army Sergeant Major and veteran of psychological operations in Vietnam,Herb Friedman explains: “Because of the widespread familiarity of the peasant with culture-drama teams and the wide acceptance of this traditional culture form, the communists seized upon the concept and developed it as a PSYOP weapon.”

APTs were a non-violent, culturally-attuned and effective way of communicating the communist message and mobilizing rural South Vietnamese to their cause. As a 1968 article in Military Review puts it: “If the United States had given a higher priority to finding out precisely what the Communists were doing psychologically in remote areas of South Vietnam between 1955 and 1959, and to urging the government of [South] Vietnam to develop and use a counter-psychological operation strategy, the Viet Cong would have been less able to exploit peasant resentments and to get them organized to support a guerrilla war the people did not want.”

Hearts & Minds in Saigon 

Perhaps the greatest testament to the success of the communist Armed Propaganda Teams is the fact that South Vietnamese and U.S. forces adopted the same tactics after coming to understand their effectiveness. These and similar missions were referred to as ‘psychological operations’—PSYOPS—by the U.S. military. Anti-communist APTs conducted operations similar to their communist counterparts and consisted of South Vietnamese cadre accompanied by U.S. troops.

The first two Anti-communist APT companies were organised in 1964 and many of the cadre were former communists who could speak with credibility of the actions and conditions on both sides of the fight. The program grew to 75 companies by 1969. Anti-communist forces also employed entertainment through ‘Culture-Drama Teams’. Their tactics were similar to the communists. They would engage villagers in singing, including teaching the people the South Vietnamese national anthem, teaching them the positive goals of the Saigon government, and giving news of government successes, programs and improvements.

In the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. does not seem to have fully taken these lessons from the Vietnam War on board.

American efforts to combat communism and win hearts and minds in Southeast Asia, and those of the French before them, were referred to generally as “pacification”. For most rural South Vietnamese in 1954, the newly independent government in Saigon was far away and not very relevant to their lives. Many government bureaucrats adopted the hands-off approach French colonial administrators had taken, remaining remote from citizens and more concerned with forms than people.

However, with the 1954 Geneva Accords dividing of the nation along the 17th parallel,  Ngo Dinh Diem’s government had to gain support from its citizens, not least of all because within two years there would—supposedly—be national elections encompassing both North and South Vietnam  in which Vietnamese would decide between communism and democracy. Saigon would have two years to reach the people outside of the provincial capitals before the July 1956 elections and do it better than the communists.

The Special Commissariat for Civic Action (CDV)—Cong Dan Vu—was the brainchild of Kieu Cong Cung, a nationalist former soldier and police chief. He had also been Viet Minh in the fight against the French return in 1945, so knew the communist’s tactics first-hand. The idea was to get the government out of offices and into villages, showing it could improve lives. It “attempted to place the resources of the South Vietnamese state behind an effort to duplicate the tactics of the communists at the village level and beat them at their own game”.

Mobile groups of CDV cadre, with support from local government, would connect with the people by living alongside them while working with them on civil projects to improve local living conditions. The first groups deployed in 1955 and began working in villages on information campaigns, attitude surveys and distributing medical aid. Their role expanded to holding classes on government services, ensuring each village had a school, a council, a village hall and a medical station, helping locals to build whichever they did not have. Once they achieved some success in an area, they moved on to another. Initial reports were optimistic.

Unfortunately, the CDV program met with resistance from the beginning. The provincial governors resisted it as encroaching on their power and budgets. Provincial administrators felt the work below their status. Village chiefs did not like the intrusion of outsiders from Saigon. Language and dialects proved to be a barrier. Often when CDV teams left, things would return to their previous state without support to maintain improvements. CDV cadres were being targeted for assassination by communist insurgents. U.S. advisers thought the program too ambitious and costly for Diem’s budget.

Despite its great promise, there simply was not enough support, time, money or cadres. In the end, the July 1956 elections which the CDV was envisioned to help Diem win never took place. It became clear the communists would win them by a wide margin. On the advice of the U.S., the South claimed it had not been party to the Geneva Accords and could therefore ignore them. The temporary split of Vietnam became permanent and set the stage for the Vietnam War.

Early on anti-communist forces recognized the need to control the population to prevent communist communication and weed out communists. One of the tenets of revolutionary guerrilla warfare was Mao’s exhortation that “the guerrilla must move among the people as a fish swims the sea.” Communist guerrillas depended upon the local population for information, shelter, money, food, and new recruits. Separating the guerrilla “fish” from their “sea” of people would do them harm.

During the Malayan Emergency, British forces experienced some success with the “Briggs Plan”, which saw rural populations relocated to fortified, defensible “New Villages” with controlled entry and exit, separating the insurgents from the people and drawing them into the open to find support. As part of his effort to install democracy in Vietnam “from the bottom up”, Ngo Dinh Diem instituted the Agroville Programme in 1959—later Strategic Hamlet Program or New Life Hamlets—in an effort to isolate communists from the people.

The fortified, controlled villages—guarded, moated, barbed-wired and bamboo-fenced—prevented communists from entering to exploit them for supplies and recruits. Residents gave up their ID card upon exiting the village to work the fields and their identity was checked upon return. The program was incentivized by providing electricity, schools and medical facilities. A network of roads linked the hamlets. Hamlet councils linked residents to the government for the first time and the government felt the villages safe enough to extend credit to farmers. Villagers were organised into a self-defense force and devoted one day a week to maintaining defenses. Communication between villages and news awareness improved with the installation of radios. By 1962, the Diem government claimed 39% of South Vietnamese lived in such communities .

The program created as many problems as it solved. Thousands were uprooted from their farms and made to build new homes—unpaid—within controlled villages, often far from their ancestral homes. For Vietnamese, veneration of ancestors is important and leaving behind graves caused great social disruption. In its zeal to complete the project, initially the government uprooted 20,000 people to build a village for that could only hold 6,000, leaving 14,000 angry peasants. Many of those forced to move and into labor held smoldering resentment against the U.S. and the Diem government for uprooting them, something the communists exploited. Communist propaganda against the hamlets pictured them as concentration camps or prisons and they made great efforts to infiltrate the hamlets to agitate against the South from inside.

To America, the program was a way to isolate and starve communists. To the communists, it created further propaganda opportunities to show the repression suffered under the U.S. and Diem. To Ngo Dinh Diem, it was a way for his government to reach and control the people.

Lessons For Counterinsurgents Today

• For government to gain the support of the people, the government must reach the people positively. The newly-independent democratic government was a wholly new beast to its people who had only lived under French colonial administration and had to convince them of its worth. Insurgent forces were more effective at reaching even the most rural of communities. U.S. and government efforts were too little, too late despite their potential to deliver tangible public benefits to rural populations insurgent forces could not have. American and local government efforts were less successful at reaching and convincing the people of their worth than insurgent forces.

• Barriers keep bad things out, but they also keep them in.While barriers separated insurgents from the population they depended upon for support, their use also reinforced the propaganda image of local government and U.S. oppression. It disrupted social cohesion and fostered resentment among the people. The government reached the people in a negative way. Walls can keep people out, but not ideas. People frustrated by the obstacles to normal life constructed by COIN forces presented fertile ground for the insurgent’s ideology—the center of gravity and the focus of their effort to win the war.

In the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. does not seem to have fully taken these lessons from the Vietnam War on board. America’s effort to establish governments that have positive reach outside of Baghdad and Kabul has returned mixed results at best despite billions of dollars and thousands of lives invested in building them. Local governments have been unable to prove their value to their people—or at least no better than their opponents have—despite the claimed importance of winning “hearts and minds” to the American effort. Perhaps it is indeed true that our Generals were still fighting the last war

The 'Hot' War in Cold War Southeast Asia

This article originally appeared in Cicero Magazine on 3 July 2014.

The popular understanding of wars past is an important determining factor how wars in the future will be received or perceived by the general public. Policymakers have come to understand this and turn it to their advantage. Equating an intervention with upholding democracy plays well when compared with WWI, when the world was “made safe for democracy”. Interventions involving the liberation of oppressed masses or a gathering existential threat are compared with WWII. Opponents of interventions latch on to these comparisons as well, equating them with quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq. As time goes on, the general memory and popular factual understanding of these wars weakens despite more historical and archival evidence presenting a truer picture being opened by governments or discovered by academics. Despite having ended only 25 years ago, the Cold War presents such a case.

The Cold War was not one war fought in one place, but several wars fought in different theatres in different ways. The most familiar narrative of the Cold War focuses on the struggle in Europe between the United States and the Soviet Union. The American view of the Indochina Wars was that they were but another theatre in the war against international communism—the Global Cold War. For the French and Southeast Asians, it was a different battle. The French fought to preserve a dying colonial system; Southeast Asians, for national liberation and/or a new system based on communist principles.

The Cold War in Southeast Asia bore little resemblance to the Cold War in the West. The Southeast Asian Cold War was not “cold” at all…

The Cold War in Southeast Asia bore little resemblance to the Cold War in the West. The Southeast Asian Cold War was not ‘cold’ at all and, rather than a state-centric battle fought with nuclear threats, espionage and military-industrial production across clearly drawn map lines, the Indochina Wars were ‘hot’ wars featuring weak central governments with soft borders, the main driver of which was to capture the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people of Southeast Asia, who largely determined the course of the wars.

The Western Cold War

The Cold War in the West was a battle between states in two clear blocs along clear national borders. The map-lines of Cold War Europe were drawn at the 1945 Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. The “Iron Curtain” fell along the Oder-Neisse Line, running from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Czech border in the south, then traced southwards to the Mediterranean through Austria and Italy, divided in half between joint occupations. Control of defeated Germany and its capital, Berlin, was also split between the US, UK, France and the USSR. Following 1948 elections, Italy joined NATO as a full member of the West bloc. In 1955 Austria became a neutral state and occupation troops withdrew. Otherwise, national borders and lines between East and West in Cold War Europe remained largely unchanged for 45 years until German re-unification and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Yalta, 1945.

The Cold War was an ‘imaginary war’ in which the two sides threatened each other with annihilation, but no direct military battles were fought. The deterrent effect of nuclear weapons and collective security guarantees of NATO and the Warsaw Pact made the cost of war in Europe too high. The sides confronted one another along their border. Many such scenes played in Berlin, including the 1948 Blockade and Airlift and the 1961 confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie. The two sides also tried to out-produce one another, engaging in a statistical battle in which agricultural, industrial and military production were weapons. They engaged in an arms race to produce and field more and better nuclear weapons in different forms and faster than the other. The only fighting in any real sense was between intelligence services in a “shadow war of espionage, counter-espionage and covert actions. The armies were the security and intelligence agencies of West and East, the CIA and the KGB, and the multitude of other forces lined up on one or the other side. In the war that could never become a real war…”

The Western Cold War was a state-centric conflict prosecuted through nuclear posturing, national military-industrial production and covert intelligence operations fought across tightly-controlled national borders. It is telling that many of the most intense military confrontations of the European Cold War–and much espionage activity–hinged on the ‘German question’ and the fate of a single city, Berlin, issues not finally resolved until the fall of the Wall and the collapse of European communism.

The ideological battle to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Europeans was an important component, but the “center of gravity” in the European conflict–to use Karl von Clausewitz’s phrase–was the governments of the states involved. Governments and their security apparatuses could control the behavior of their citizens. Though the threat of nuclear war hung over their heads, the fighting was not real in its literal sense. Which side the average European fell on depended on where they lived, determined for them by the Big Three at conference tables in Yalta and Potsdam.

The Cold War in Southeast Asia

Pandora’s Box

Pham Van Dong & Ho Chi Minh, 1966.

In contrast to the West, the Southeast Asian Cold War, rather than ushering in the beginning of a new struggle, was the continuation of a struggle which had begun for some, such as Ho Chi Minh, as early as the 1920s. The struggle for Indochina predated the Cold War. The Japanese invasion in 1941 and return of the French in 1945 “opened Pandora’s box”, creating the opportunity to fight return of French rule to Indochina—something Southeast Asians may not have pursued nor achieved without the break in French control created by the war. The post-WWII period for Indochinese marked the resumption of two intertwined battles—that of liberation from French colonial rule and between communist and anti-communist forces to determine which system would govern independent Indochina.

Hot War

Arguably, the Cold War in Asia was not ‘cold’ at all. Unlike in Europe, where opposing forces stared each other down across borders but never fired a shot, the Southeast Asian Cold War was ‘hot’. Real armed battles were fought between colonial and nationalist and communist and anti-communist forces almost from the very beginning. During the First Indochina War, there would also be violent ethnic, religious and factional fighting among differentIndochinese populations alongside the battle for independence. Over two decades, troops would invade, occupy and fight in, to varying degrees, all of the Indochinese states in the First and Second Indochina War, resulting in hundreds of thousands of total casualties—something unthinkable in Cold War Europe.

Soft Borders

The battle in Southeast Asia was not between governments behind clearly drawn borders on either side of a clear line of demarcation between democracy and communism. Borders mattered little in the Southeast Asian Cold War. There was no Oder-Neisse Line in Indochina. The 1954 17^th parallel border between North and South Vietnam came to matter very little due to communist infiltration and American bombing.

In Southeast Asia, Western governments were unwilling to commit fully to total war and unwilling or unable to take, occupy and hold territory they had won.

Under French rule, the states of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos had all been one large colony–Indochina. There had always been interchange between these regions-cum-states, each with significant diaspora in the others. Many national leaders of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos would be born or spend significant time in neighboring states. Close lingual, religious, cultural and ethnic relations facilitated ‘softer’ borders.

Much of the fighting during the Second Indochina War took place in South Vietnam and spilled over the border into Cambodia and Laos. Communist and anti-communist forces throughout Southeast Asia cooperated with kindred factions and used each other’s territories to transit through or as a sanctuary from their own fight across the border. The famous Ho Chi Minh and King Sihanouk Trails used by communist forces to transit the borders of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are examples. Governments in distant Saigon, Phnom Penh or Vientiane could do little to control their frontiers. The porous nature of these borders has been blamed specifically for “enlarging” the Second Indochina War beyond Vietnam.

Weak Eastern Governments and Lack of Western Will

French propaganda poster following defeat at Dien Bien Phu, 1954.

Governments had far less power in Southeast Asia than their counterparts in Europe. Throughout most of the Cold War, Southeast Asian states had two or more governments which claimed rule. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia experienced periods in which territory in each was controlled by opposing governments, dividing the country, each claiming to hold legitimate power over the whole.

The sides hurled propaganda. South Vietnam was called a puppet of the United States, while North Vietnam was a creature of Beijing. The governments of Cambodia and Laos claimed neutrality, but received aid from all sides in a constant tug of war between North Vietnam, America, Russia and China. There was no grand post-WWII modernization and development plan like the Marshall Plan for Europe. Efforts to form effective Asian collective security regimes, such as SEATO, were stymied by the Geneva Accords requirement Indochinese states remain neutral.

Government heads did not stay in power long and there were constant overthrow attempts by both communist and anti-communist forces. There were multiple mutiny or coup attempts from 1960 against Ngo Dinh Diem in the lead up to his 1963 assassination, a trend which continued with his successors until 1966. Loyalties also shifted. King Sihanouk of Cambodia was seemingly onevery side of the struggle in Cambodia at one time or another—monarchist, republican, anti-communist and finally with the Khmer Rouge communists.

Ngo Dinh Diem, 1955

In previous modern wars such as WWI and WWII, large-scale troop deployments and naval, air, armor and artillery support were central features and the war was prosecuted largely by one army defeating the enemy militarily and advancing to occupy ever more territory until the state leadership was destroyed or it capitulated. Capitols, major population centers and industrial areas were particular targets of bombing campaigns. It was total war. Both world wars ended when belligerent governments surrendered. Their troops stopped fighting and normal life returned.

In Southeast Asia, Western governments were unwilling to commit fully to total war and unwilling or unable to take, occupy and hold territory they had won. French commanders decided, rather than occupy Indochina with enough troops to guarantee security, they would pursue a “hedgehog” strategy of fighting the war through forays into enemy territory from a series of heavily fortified encampments, leading to their encirclement and 1954 surrender at Dien Bien Phu. The US, having just fought an unpopular war in Korea, was unwilling to commit to another war in Asia. Eisenhower did not want America to be seen as supporting French imperialism in Indochina and would not act without diplomatic support from Britain and Australia.

There was no line of advance as there had been during WWII, behind which the war was over and civilians viewed themselves as ‘liberated’. Conversely, Southeast Asians saw the Westerners, especially the French, as ‘occupiers’. Communist forces, in territory and a culture much more home to them than their white counterparts, returned wherever they left. The moment Western troops left an area, they lost control of it. They controlled Vietnam only “100 yards on either side of all major roads”. Though America used its fire support assets to great effect and multiplied the effectiveness of its troops, the enemy did not abate for it.

Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara, John F. Kennedy, 1963.

The U.S. government policy, championed by Robert McNamara, of relying on “body counts” and statistics as metrics to determine victory led America tolose focus on other factors. Despite the focus on killing the enemy, America often refrained from bombing North Vietnamese government targets in the capital, Hanoi, as a tactic to keep them at the negotiating table while using B-52’s to carpet bomb entire swathes elsewhere in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This angered civilians and turned them into refugees, fleeing into the arms of communists—particularly benefiting the Khmer Rouge. The French and American governments sought to end their wars in Southeast Asia as soon as they began and both eventually pursued negotiated settlements. They did not win the wars.

Those Who Forget History…

The popular conception of past wars and what, where, how, who and why they were conducted is often incomplete and the accuracy of the picture fades over time despite the clearer image produced by years of academic study after the fact. The Cold War is a perfect example, with the story of the Western or European Cold War the dominant narrative over what was a “hot war” in Southeast Asia. Since the dominant narratives or popular conception of wars past determines how wars are perceived in the future, it becomes all the more important to look deeper into even recent history for an accurate picture of events. Why? As ever—those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

Will U.S. Military Advisors Face ‘Mission Creep’ in Iraq?

This article originally appeared in Cicero Magazine on 23 June 2014.

President Obama announced as many as 300 U.S. military advisers may be deployed to Iraq to assist the government in fighting the Sunni extremist group ISIS, which has invaded areas of western Iraq. The White House is also considering airstrikes. In 2012 President Obama withdrew the last U.S. troops from Iraq, keeping a campaign pledge to end the American presence there. The President has promised that “American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq” and that military advisers will only be there to assist Iraqi forces to repel the ISIS invaders. But some have called this misleading and pointed out that U.S. military advisors certainly have engaged in combat in the past and will again if sent back to Iraq. But would the deployment of U.S. military advisers mean U.S. troops will be engaged in combat in Iraq again?

I served as a U.S. military adviser while attached to a Military Transition Team (MiTT) in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Our job was to provide for our assigned Iraqi infantry battalion what they did not have themselves–namely medical evacuation capability (MEDEVAC), air and artillery support, and certain forms of intelligence. We also facilitated training in administration, logistics, equipment and weapons maintenance, electronic communications, and operational and tactical strategy—all the skills of professional soldiers. We acted as liaison between our Iraqi battalion and its sister U.S. battalion responsible for the same sector. We also evaluated and reported on the readiness of the Iraqi unit to function autonomously. We were certainly engaged in combat, accompanying Iraqi units on patrols and cordon and search operations. Several U.S. members of our unit were killed and seriously injured in combat operations, along with scores of Iraqi soldiers.

Throughout WWII, U.S. military adviser General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell and his staff provided high-level military assistance to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and commanded Chinese and Western troops as Chiang’s Chief of Staff. Though their role was originally envisioned to be purely advisory in nature, the United States pushed for Stilwell to be placed in charge of all allied forces in the Chinese theatre, something Chiang resisted until the last. Stilwell and his staff had to fight their way out of Burma following Chinese defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1941, and Stilwell spent the rest of his time in China fighting with Chiang rather than the Japanese.

The re-deployment of U.S. military advisors to Iraq will not automatically mean putting American troops back into combat. But it could.

Perhaps the clearest example of U.S. military advisors becoming engaged in combat comes from Vietnam. Following the 1945 Japanese surrender, France attempted to regain control of its pre-war colony, Indochina. They returned to strong nationalist and communist resistance in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos which they lacked the understanding or will to fight. A small contingent of U.S. advisers were first dispatched to Indochina in 1950 to support the French military, still recovering from WWII and desperately trying to fight the communist insurgency with antiquated equipment. The U.S. mission was to train French forces on new military equipment the U.S. had supplied them to aid France in its fight against the communists.

After the final French defeat of the First Indochina War at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the U.S. began to directly advise the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem in its fight against communist North Vietnam and their indigenous Viet Cong allies. From 1955 to 1960, the U.S. mission grew to as many as 1,500 military advisors. As the Viet Cong insurgency grew in the South, the number of U.S. military advisors grew exponentially, with over 16,000 U.S. military advisors in South Vietnam by 1963. In an extreme example of ‘mission creep’, the soldiers of the Military Assistance Advisory Group-Vietnam (MAAG-V) and the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MAC-V) from 1950 to 1973 moved from a small advisory role to an allied Western military to an open combat role in a grinding Cold War counterinsurgency. They did much more than engage in ‘self-defence’, as once claimed by the Kennedy administration.

Not all U.S. military advisory missions have led to U.S. troops engaging in combat, however. Following WWII, U.S. military advisors assisted in the rebuilding of Germany, the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Europe, and reconstruction efforts in Japan, China and Korea. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. military advisers trained South American military forces to stabilise their governments against communist rebels during Foreign Internal Defense (FID) missions. More recently, the United States has increased its military advisory presence in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. U.S. military advisers have trained troops and advised governments in Nigeria, South Sudan, Chad, Congo, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Yemen and the Philippines, among others, in recent years. Civilian civil servants with the U.S. Department of Defense also engage in military advisory missions through programs such as the Ministry of Defense Advisors Program (MoDA). The U.S. has frequently deployed civilian and military defence advisors during peacetime to assist allies through structures such as NATO in Europe and the defunct Cold War-era SEATO in Asia. The re-deployment of U.S. military advisors to Iraq will not automatically mean putting American troops back into combat.

But it could. U.S. Special Operations Forces, especially U.S. Army Green Berets, were originally conceived with the intent of training and organising indigenous troops to become a competent and coherent fighting force to engage in unconventional warfare or to train allied government troops in Foreign Internal Defence or counter-insurgency missions. Building an effective fighting force can hardly be done solely in a theoretical, classroom environment, and even field training under simulated fighting conditions is no substitute for real combat. Special Operations Forces often provide theoretical instruction, followed by field training, and progressing into leading, advising and evaluating performance in combat operations when necessary. If U.S. military advisers are deployed to Iraq, they will likely be Special Operations Forces who possess language and cultural skills and years of previous experience on the ground in Iraq. Anonymous U.S. officials have said the Pentagon would ask for U.S. Special Operations Forces to be on the ground in order to support advisory and intelligence operations there.

The U.S. has already invested billions of dollars, scores of American lives, and six years into training and equipping Iraqi government troops. That is more years of U.S. military training and experience than I had when I first deployed to Iraq myself in 2003. The Iraqi military has been engaged in a counterinsurgency battle on their home turf for years so are not novices to combat. They have already been trained by U.S. advisors. Difficulties in agreeing to an acceptable SOFA agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are the reason there has been no U.S. military advisory presence in Iraq since 2012. Now al-Maliki and the Iraqi government want U.S. forces to return.

There is a historical danger a renewed U.S. military advisory mission in Iraq could “creep” from helping Iraq to help itself into doing it for them. The U.S. may launch airstrikes against ISIS forces—something President Obama has announced he is considering—but they could not do so effectively without trained American controllers on the front lines, which would necessarily place them ‘in combat’—something the President has promised not to do. During the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, President Obama promised there would be no U.S. presence on the ground and that the U.S. would take a backseat to its European allies. Behind the scenes, paramilitary forces from U.S. intelligence were indeed on the ground in Libya and the U.S. military played a much larger role than was publicly acknowledged.

JCS Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, once in overall charge of the American effort to train police and military forces in Iraq, warned that the U.S. does not have the intelligence capability to effectively lead and target airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq. The Iraqi army was not trained or equipped with communications equipment which would enable them to effectively guide U.S. airstrikes. The U.S. was rightly hesitant to train and equip a foreign military with that capability. Arguably only U.S. boots on the ground—filled by troops trained in combat air control—could make the difference.

In sum, U.S. military advisors have historically been deployed in both combat and non-combat roles. While there is a precedent, it does not necessarily follow that the re-deployment of U.S. military advisors to Iraq will lead to “mission creep” or putting American troops into combat there again. For the option of U.S. airstrikes being employed against ISIS in Iraq to be effective, however, U.S. controllers would most likely have to be on the ground at the front lines. So how does one definitively determine if U.S. troops are “in combat”? This is probably the question that is easiest answer. Forget what the President, Congress, the lawyers, the experts or the media say on the issue. To quote one of Murphy’s Laws: “If you are being shot at, you are in combat.”

American Military Decline? Not When Force is Used Properly

This post originally appeared in Small Wars Journal on 7 November 2012.

In recent years many have cited America’s military struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan as signs of decline. Political wrangling over the size, use, and budget of the U.S. military, withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, the fault and effects of impending sequestration, and the Arab Spring and its follow-on effects have, among other issues, put wind in the sails of this theory. Others hold using military force for ‘wars of choice’ is no longer a viable option for America. However, to think that America can’t or shouldn’t project its power globally when necessary is a mistake. America’s military struggles in the post-9/11 era have stemmed from improper application of military force. Put simply, our recent counterinsurgency efforts haven’t been using it right. When used as it should be, using military force is still an effective choice.

A soldier’s job is to fight and win in combat and to prepare to do so. Nowhere in the job description is being an international aid worker mentioned. It is a testament to the commitment and adaptability of the U.S. military that they have been as successful as they have been at it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Providing public works, policing, community political relations, and social services is something that should be done by educated and experienced professionals in that area. The U.S. military is a hammer, not a scalpel. However, our troops have been asked to fill these sensitive roles on a steep learning curve over the last decade because of our own domestic politics have required it.

Our highest elected leaders are responsible for this. Americans don’t like to spend money on ‘foreign aid.’ Politicians, especially of the conservative variety, characterize this spending as wasteful and beat the drum against it as fiscally irresponsible. Foreign development assistance actually comprises less than one percent of the federal budget, but the returns received are much more cost effective, though hard to quantify. It costs much more to send one soldier to Afghanistan for a year than it does to build a school or new market building that will stand to be used for decades in places the sorely need them.

These were the programs Gen. Petraeus, Gen. McChrystal, and other military leaders asked for to help win hearts and minds. But conservative resistance to spending on any programs considered foreign aid means the professionals at places like the U.S. State Department and USAID or even the UN and non-governmental organizations weren’t going to get the job. Our troopers had to add it to their already long to-do list. Funneling it through the military was the only way it would get done at all. That’s not doing it right.

Following NATO’s decision to severely curtail joint patrols with Afghan security forces, the wisdom and effectiveness of training and equipping indigenous forces to eventually replace U.S. troops has also been questioned. This is a tactic the U.S. has been used often in places like Korea, Vietnam, South America, and the Philippines, among others, and again in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of these efforts were moderately successful, but not successful enough that the U.S. has ever been able to fully disengage in these places. We still have troops in Korea, Vietnam was overrun, and we’re still engaged in the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. These efforts can be successful as an auxiliary to a military campaign, but not as its main effort.

Often these efforts revolve around cooperating with a marginalized minority, such as the Montagnards in Vietnam, Kurds in Iraq, and Hazara in Afghanistan. When the U.S. eventually departs, these people can become even more marginalized as a result. These forces also lack the air, logistical, financial, and political support needed to be self-sustaining afterwards and can at times feel abandoned by America when finally do leave, as with Osama bin Laden and the Mujahedeen in 1980’s Afghanistan. Building security capacity essentially from scratch after effecting a regime change, especially in states with vast cultural differences from our own, is a very tall order to fill.

However, there is benefit to the U.S. in building military-to-military relations outside of conflict. There is a great difference between a modern, professional military and a ragtag militia when they’re called to respond to internal conflicts. Despite controversy over America’s military support of Egypt during Mubarak’s rule, the Egyptian military’s show of relative restraint was not just a sign of support for the people, but of an institution that believes it has a responsibility to the nation. A less professional force may have answered the calls by some to crush demonstrations or so reacted of their own volition. The Egyptian military has had a great deal of exchange with the U.S. military and the British military before it. The role of a professional military as a neutral arbiter in national conflicts can also be seen in Turkey, Thailand, and Pakistan. However, such relationships should be built in peacetime, not after a conflict has occurred.

Another example of the misuse of American military power has come in the weak, middling size of troop numbers sent into major combat—numbers fixed by the administration. America’s elected leadership opted for smaller, faster, lighter, more-economical force packages that, while winning all the battles, have arguably not won the wars. The small number of U.S. troops on the ground and reliance on indigenous forces early on in Afghanistan allowed al Qaeda and the Taliban to slip away into Pakistan, where they continue to operate today by straddling the border. The lack of sufficient troop numbers in Iraq meant America couldn’t provide adequate security when it decided to stay put and later necessitated the ‘surge’ to stave off sectarian civil war and allow the return of commerce, also emulated later in Afghanistan. Though these were certainly major troop commitments, they weren’t enough to get the job done from the outset.

The problems that insufficient troop numbers created have proven wrong those critical of the Powell Doctrine, such as Paul Wolfowitz, and vindicated its supporters, such as Gen. Eric Shinseki. It is arguable that a stronger commitment of troops from the very beginning in both Afghanistan and Iraq would have turned up better results. The mission in Afghanistan suffered in particular from the loss of attention and resources caused by the Iraq War. The administration was keen to commit to the wars, but having decided to take the course, was unwilling to commit to it as much as necessary to guarantee victory from the beginning. Bring back the Powell Doctrine.

However that does not mean that every American intervention should become D-Day. There still is scope for America to intervene militarily in world events on moral or humanitarian grounds. When or what those grounds are is another discussion. The past twenty years have shown that U.S. interventions can be successful when they have clear, concise objectives that are consistent throughout the action and on a short timeline in which to achieve them. Limiting campaigns to air strikes with intelligence, material, medical, and humanitarian support for local allies on the ground and keeping our own conventional ground troops out has been successful. Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya are examples. Iraq and Afghanistan are examples where intervening has gone wrong because they did not stick to these principles. Even in small, limited interventions, the commitment of force must be sufficient to meet a clear objective from the outset. The 1992 adventure in Somalia is an example where this failed.

It can be said that when it comes to using U.S. military power, it should be an all or nothing affair. If a major commitment of ground troops is required, it should follow the Powell Doctrine. If a small-scale intervention is decided upon, it should attract as full a commitment of force and support proportionate to meet the objective without ground troops. The past decade has shown that opting for a middling, unclear, inconsistent approach does not work.

Fighting grinding counterinsurgency campaigns has apparently become acceptable to America. CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus wrote his doctoral thesis and the military manual on it. It’s the topic of thousands of professional journal articles, newspaper columns, and PowerPoint slideshows. However, we do not have to accept the idea of confronting an insurgency as an inevitability or necessity of modern warfare. In fact, America would do well to avoid having to apply COIN tactics at all by avoiding insurgencies altogether.

Insurgencies are a case of catching the tiger by his tail. Once America invades a country on the ground and decides to accept the responsibility of rebuilding it or, rather, making it into something it never was, it will meet resistance. Not only local resistance, but regional as planting our flag also becomes a beacon for like-minded opponents to come and fight us. The argument that holds we have to stay, occupy, and rebuild a nation is that if we do not, we’ll be facing the same threat again down the road, not to mention moral obligations to fix what we’ve broken.

After WWII we decided not to repeat the mistakes of the Versailles Treaty following WWI and invested in rebuilding our foes under the Marshall Plan. But Afghanistan and Iraq are not Germany and Japan. Current history shows the results of following this logic are just as unpalatable as not following it. After ten years, Afghanistan and Iraq are much the same countries for average citizens as they were when we started. Only the cast of characters at the top has changed.

We have applied a strategy that worked well fifty years ago in two industrialized nations with previously-existing strong central governments to two underdeveloped Middle Eastern states with significant cultural differences, one of which has never had a strong central government in its entire history. That was a mistake. Leaving aside discussion about justifications for either war, the fact is that the U.S. should not have stayed in Afghanistan or Iraq, let alone both simultaneously. It is an aggravating factor that we also did not plan for the immediate aftermath or a long occupation afterward, yet went ahead with them anyway.

What should we have done? Leaving aside discussion of justification for going to war, we should have set very clear, concise, and consistent objectives and, having achieved them, left. In both cases, one objective was clearly unconditional surrender. In Afghanistan, the goal should have been to capture Osama bin Laden and his identified lieutenants, along with the whole of the Taliban leadership. Iraq is a more controversial case. It is clear now that the weapons of mass destruction did not exist. Another goal there should have been to capture Saddam Hussein and his identified lieutenants.

We should have followed the Powell Doctrine. The invasion should have been preceded by a build-up of troop levels sufficient to secure the whole of the country and should have proceeded at a pace expeditiously enough to block all escape routes and eliminate all resistance on a steady march toward the center. We should have blocked the escape across the Tora Bora Mountains or, failing that, pursued al Qaeda and the Taliban into Pakistan if necessary. We should have destroyed all Baathist or Fedayeen Saddam units we encountered, rather than bypassing some of them in a race to Baghdad.

We should have seen necessarily to humanitarian needs with programs administered through the State Department, USAID, the UN, and NGOs, secured by the U.S. military. At most, we should have facilitated and secured a gathering of national leaders, but not interfered in its decisions. Our troop drawdown should have begun within six months. We should have continued to provide humanitarian aid and assistance during and after withdrawal. All assistance beyond that should only have been given upon request from the self-determined leadership of Afghanistan or Iraq.

If years later a threat to America or its allies or vital interests is presented by the same nation, then America uses military force to eliminate it once again following the same template. The best way to defeat an insurgency is not to give it time or be present for it to develop. This strategy can be repeated ad infinium. America should always expect to face an insurgency, but never accept that it must. Nowhere in the rulebook does it say the U.S. must remain in or occupy a country it has invaded. Recently, we have chosen to. Once the threat has been removed, we have accomplished the objective. Anything beyond that is territory where the wisdom of continued use of military force becomes questionable, the rules of engagement become shaky, the objectives become unclear and inconsistent, and an insurgency is likely to develop.

The campaign in Libya was a success because it had a clear, concise, and consistent goal—namely to end the rule of Muammar Qaddafi. After some initial hesitation, America decided to intervene. The successful result shows that when a correct assessment of the amount of force needed to achieve the objective is applied proportionately, we will succeed. Had we limited our involvement to non-military support, the mission likely would have failed as the resistance was defeated by Qaddafi’s superior military forces. Sending troops in was never an option. If we had sent U.S. troops into Libya, following the model of Afghanistan and Iraq, they would likely still be there and perhaps face an insurgency. Despite toppling the oppressive Qaddafi regime there, the recent anti-American violence in Benghazi shows not everyone would have accepted our presence. The program of directed airstrikes and tactical support was strong enough to tip the balance. American involvement there was over in less than ninety days and with zero U.S. casualties.

It would be a mistake to believe America’s military power is in decline. America, even with proposed cuts, still spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. No other nation can match the United States’ ability to project power anywhere in the world on just a few days or hours’ notice. Though multiple combat deployments have taken their toll, America’s military is the most experienced in the world. It has been fighting two grinding wars on multiple fronts tens of thousands of miles from home in some of the most inhospitable terrain imaginable. Most of our opponents are still stuck at home, parading their troops and aging equipment down the streets of their own capitols. Despite sometimes bad policy decisions by its elected civilian leadership regarding the use of force, the United States military has risen to meet its challenges and succeeded despite them. That’s no sign of decline.