Counterinsurgency and the US Military

 by Tom Snodgrass  

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Just as President Johnson “successfully” evaded confronting the external source of the Vietnam War — North Vietnam — so President Bush is also “successfully” evading confrontation with the sources of the continuing jihadist violence in Iraq.

“War is hell.”
“Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.”
“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
– Gen. William T. Sherman

“President Bush has attempted to fight a war of moderation; moderation is to war as sand in gasoline is to the functioning of an internal combustion engine.”
– Col. T. Snodgrass

Insurgency, the 20th-century term for “guerrilla warfare,” is in a sense the most ancient form of warfare, dating back in antiquity to indigenous resistance to the occupying armies of such conquerors as the Pharaoh, Alexander, and Caesar. In more recent history, the American colonists used insurgency effectively in our revolution against the British Empire at the close of the 18th century. However, the term “guerrilla” (Spanish for “little war”) and the insurgency concept it represents were widely popularized during the Napoleonic Peninsular War at the opening of the 19th century when Spanish civilians militarily resisted the occupation of their country by Napoleon’s French Army. The essence of guerrilla warfare or insurgency is to attack a conventional military force by ambush, inflict casualties, and to disappear back into the civilian populace before the conventional force can mass its superior firepower and bring it to bear on the guerrilla force. Guerrilla war was renamed insurgency during the Vietnam era to take into account the expansion of this concept of unconventional war to include media propaganda and political measures. Insurgency, in this expanded and more diverse form of unconventional warfare, continues to be with us as we begin the 21st Century. To suppress and defeat the illusive unconventional guerrilla/insurgent forces, conventional force commanders have struggled through the centuries to develop effective counterguerrilla or counterinsurgency tactics. Today, the counterinsurgency tactical development struggle goes on with renewed fervor and urgency as we face the insurgency of Islamic jihad throughout the Islamic world and beyond.

Looking critically at the war waged by the Islamic insurgency forces today, one can safely predict that President Bush’s administration faces defeat in Iraq for ignoring the very basic equation that reduces warfare to its most rudimentary form, that is, WAR = MOTIVATION + CAPABILITY. To end a war favorably, either motivation or capability must be eliminated from the equation. The capability (and no small measure of motivation) for the jihadist insurgent forces in Iraq is continually resupplied by Islamic jihadists in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. However, the President and his national security advisors, who set the U.S. course in the Battle for Iraq, continue to do everything in their power to evade coming to grips with the fact that the fundamental sources of insurgency in Iraq are outside of the Iraqi borders. Just as President Johnson “successfully” evaded confronting the external source of the Vietnam War — North Vietnam — so President Bush is also “successfully” evading confrontation with the sources of the continuing jihadist violence in Iraq, that is, Iran and its regional allies. Naturally and tragically enough we can expect President Bush's strategic approach to fail as President Johnson’s did because the evasion of the fundamental principle of war will in the end win out. When a president sets out not to deal with the major source of the war, the war will obviously end in defeat. It doesn’t take the brightest light in the harbor to illuminate that historical and logical truism.

What is interesting and ominous is that the Bush administration is hiding its war-source evasion under the very same cloak that provided cover for the Johnson Administration’s war-source evasion — counterinsurgency. By choosing to proclaim that victory will be achieved by successful counterinsurgency, while ignoring the massive influx of war materiel, skilled personnel, and money flowing into the insurgents from external sources, the Bush administration, just as the Johnson administration before it, is deceiving itself and misleading the American people as to what is necessary to actually defeat our enemy. In the administration’s recent naming of General David Petraeus, a very savvy warfighter, to lead “the surge” in Iraq, much has been made of his co-authorship of the Army’s newly rewritten field manual on counterinsurgency, FM3-24. This publicity has a familiar ring to me because presidents Kennedy and Johnson initially sold the American public on the winability of the Vietnam War based on our “new understanding and mastery” of counterinsurgency. As a junior officer at the time, I was enjoined to study counterinsurgency “because it is the wave of the future in warfare.” 

At this point I need to make clear that counterinsurgency is an essential form of warfare that needs to be an important part of our warfighting capability, and nothing I write is meant to depreciate the necessity of being able to wage skillful counterinsurgency. However, counterinsurgency falls into the category of “grand tactics,” not war-winning “grand strategy.” Counterinsurgency is basically a defensive form of war. Defensive war is by definition only victorious when the enemy ceases making war. Thus, counterinsurgency concedes the initiative to the enemy.  While not totally impossible, war is most difficult to win while the enemy holds the initiative. Victory in war on the defensive usually requires the enemy to make monumental blunders. In a war fought under realistic circumstances, the counterinsurgency defensive tactic would be teamed with an offensive strategy that exercises the initiative to destroy the enemy’s war-making capability and, consequently, end the war on dictated terms. A combination of effective defense and offense are the way wars are best fought and won.

So, as was the case in Vietnam, our national leadership has once again pinned all hope of our success in war on a successfully executed counterinsurgency defensive campaign without any real offensive strategy to go after the resupply lines. Because we now have so much riding on counterinsurgency, I considered it worthwhile to do a brief historical survey of counterinsurgency practiced by the U.S. military in order to gain a perspective of what we might expect in the Bush administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.. My “guides” in this survey are two deceased warriors, Carl von Clausewitz and Harry G. Summers, Jr., and their respective books, On War and On Strategy. Carl von Clausewitz clarified thinking about war, and Harry Summers clarified Clausewitz’s thinking further in terms of counterinsurgency as practiced in the Vietnam War. An additional authority who merits mention in regard to analysis of counterinsurgency is Max Boot and his excellent book, The Savage Wars of Peace.

How has the U.S. Military fought Counterinsurgency?

The American military’s first experience with counterinsurgency lasted throughout the American Indian Wars (1622-1900), which began when we were still under British colonial rule and continued periodically until the surrender of Geronimo in the 1880’s. While a few Indians held out until 1900, fighting had pretty much subsided after 1890. Fortunately for the white man, the American Indians never developed a comprehensive strategy for their insurgency. The Indian tribes conducted their warfare against whites using raids and skirmish tactics, thus restricting the geographical scope and impact of Indian warfare. Although the American government followed a strategy of relocating tribes away from their ancestral lands in order to decrease their war-making capabilities and open land for settlers, U.S. strategy was on the whole confused and inconsistent when dealing with the land tenure disputes that caused the bloody Indian-white clashes. The reneging on treaty promises by the U.S. government obviously provoked many of these Indian uprisings. However, at the heart of the continuing disputes were the different and incompatible European and aboriginal concepts of land ownership. The Indian insurgency-U.S. counterinsurgency came to a head as a result of the total Indian victory over Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry in 1876. That horrendous U.S. Army defeat at Little Big Horn forced the national-level decision to once and for all eradicate the capability of the Indians to wage war. In order to accomplish this previously unachieved war objective, the U.S. Army turned to the recently learned Civil War lesson of victory through denying the enemy the ability to feed his forces in the field. The fiery destruction of the Confederate granaries in the Shenandoah Valley by Gen. Phil Sheridan and in central Georgia by Gen. William T. Sherman definitively ended the war for the South.

In order to carry out this destruction of resources counterinsurgency campaign against the Indians, Gen. Sherman, Army Chief of Staff, put Gen. Sheridan, commander of the army in the West, in charge. In analyzing his mission, Sheridan clearly saw that the buffalo herds populating the Great Plains were the mainstay of the Indian culture, providing food, clothing, and shelter (buffalo-hide was used as tent material).  Sheridan rightly surmised that without the buffalo, the Indians could not sustain war parties roaming freely to attack settlers, while eluding army pursuit.  After Sheridan exterminated the great buffalo herds, the Plains Indians were forced to abandon their warrior life for sedentary agriculture on reservations in order to feed their population. Thus was ended the insurgency of the Indian wars when the Indians’ capability to wage war was completely eliminated.

As an afterthought I should note that the Great Plains would not have been able to accommodate freely roaming buffalo herds, fenced cattle ranching, and the immense grain farming that now feeds a large portion of the world at the same time. The buffalo had to go.

The next U.S. military exposure to counterinsurgency occurred in the Philippine War (1899-1902), which was the direct outgrowth of the Spanish-American War (1898). After America defeated Spain, one of the peace treaty, war-ending conditions demanded by President William McKinley was that Spain cede the Philippine Islands to the U.S. With this victory over a world power (albeit a decayed one), McKinley launched the nation into competition with Japan and the European colonial powers for naval and commercial dominance in the Pacific. The Philippines were to serve as the springboard for U.S. Pacific operations. Additionally, had the U.S. not taken possession of the Philippines, the Germans and Japanese were both desirous of adding the islands to their growing empires. So, occupation of the Philippines was a case of acting before rival competitors.

The Filipinos had already been waging an insurrection against Spanish occupation forces since 1896, so when Spanish forces were replaced by the U.S. Army after Spain’s defeat, Filipino nationalists initially welcomed the change, believing that U.S. domination would be short. However, after it became clear that President McKinley and his later successor, President Teddy Roosevelt, had come to stay, Emilio Aguinaldo turned the insurgency he had been leading against the Spanish against the Americans. The native insurrectionists initially attempted to eject the U.S. Army in conventional force battles. However, the Philippine Republican Army was quickly destroyed as a conventional fighting force within a year, and Aguinaldo and the remnants of the Republican Army melted away into the dense Philippine jungles to begin insurgent warfare.

The ensuing insurgency warfare was vicious and bloody. For instance, the 1901 massacre and dismembering of 38 officers and men of a U.S. infantry company in the Samar village of Balangiga by natives, who initially feinted friendship to lure in the unsuspecting Americans, was compared in the U.S. press to the defeat at Little Big Horn. As might be expected, the Balangiga massacre provoked severe countermeasures by the U.S. military against the native population. However, from a U.S. standpoint, this war was one of the least costly ever fought by American forces with 1,037 soldiers killed in action, 2,818 wounded, and 4,374 dying from all causes. The estimate of total Filipinos who died from direct and indirect causes of the war runs to 200,000. Between 1898 and 1902, 126,468 American servicemen served in the Philippines, but never more than 69,000 at any one time. In terms of force ratios, there was only an average of 24,000 U.S. soldiers and marines in the field at any given moment facing at least 80,000 insurgents, so American counterinsurgents were consistently outnumbered by more than three to one. Nevertheless, the U.S. forces won a decisive victory. How did they do it?

First, the Filipino leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, made the initial mistake of pitting his armed force against the U.S. Army in conventional combat, significantly attriting his manpower base from the very beginning. Second, the leadership of the U.S. Army in the Philippines was experienced in fighting insurgent warfare, as 26 of the 30 U.S. generals who fought in this war had previously fought in the Indian Wars. Third, the insurgent leader, Aguinaldo, was captured by an imaginative and daring plan personally carried out by Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston. In captivity, Aguinaldo issued a proclamation accepting the American hegemony over the Philippines and calling on the insurgents to give up, which more than 4,000 hardcore fighters did shortly thereafter.  Fourth, the U.S. leadership recruited Filipinos with different ethnic backgrounds than the insurgents, known as the “Macabebe Scouts,” to track and locate the insurgents (a similar tactic also used with great success during the Indian Wars). Fifth, the U.S. effectively used rewards (political, commercial, schools, hospitals, and other public works) and punishments (aggressive interrogation, population relocation to isolate the insurgents, and execution in extreme cases) to gain intelligence on the insurgents. Sixth, the U.S. Navy provided invaluable naval gunfire support, rapid troop movements, and interdiction patrols, without which victory would not have been possible on a battlefield surrounded by water. Finally, I’ve saved this most significant point for last, and it was the fact that the insurgents received no outside support and resupply which made the greatest difference. On the international stage, there was no great incentive for other foreign powers to underwrite the insurgency, and what there was could not overcome the interdiction capability of the U.S. Navy. The mere fact that the enemy forces were on islands which was effectively blockaded by the U.S. naval forces was enough to destroy the insurgents' long-term capability to wage war.

What the Indian Wars and the Philippine War clearly establish is that, as an insurgency consumes its war-making resources and is not resupplied, it ceases to have the capability to make war, even if the motivation is still present. Obviously counterinsurgency is not brain surgery or rocket science. If simple soldiers can grasp that the “no resupply concept” is the key to success in winning wars, even politicians and government bureaucrats should be able to absorb this lesson. Yet, in the face of what appear to be the most obvious of facts about war, the Bush administration refuses to deal with resupply except to say that it will attempt to interrupt and interdict these supplies once they have crossed into Iraq. As we have noted before, this failed in Vietnam and it will fail in Iraq because even if only some lesser percentage of the resupply is missed, it will be enough in this day and age of asymmetrical war to feed the insurgency’s ability to cause mayhem and instability. This is aggravated in Iraq, where it takes relatively little in the way of murder and mayhem to create massive instability among an Iraqi population that has far more pulling them apart than uniting them, from religious hostilities to political and financial motivations.

A smaller, separate insurgency occurred on Mindanao, the second largest Philippine island, and on adjacent islands of the southern Sulu archipelago between 1900 and 1913. This insurgency pitted the “Moros,” Philippine Muslims, against American forces as they established control over this remote part of the southern Philippines. The scope of the Moro insurgency never approximated that led by Emilio Aguinaldo in and around Manila on Luzon, or did it actually threaten American power. But it nevertheless lasted longer and was never as definitively resolved as was the conflict with the Aguinaldo insurgents. Whenever the American and Moro forces met in battle, the Moros were decimated with correspondingly few American casualities. However, the Moros were most troublesome in suicide attacks carried out with the intent of killing one or a small number of Americans before an American fusillade dispatched them to the hereafter and the company of the 70+ virgins, who the Moros believed would attend them for eternity in Paradise. The Moros never challenged American supremacy in force again after the 1913 Battle of Bud Bagsak on Mindanao when the Moros suffered at least 500 killed compared to 14 Americans killed and 11 wounded. The two U.S. Army officers who skillfully contained the Moros by administering regular bloody defeats were Brig. Gen John Pershing and Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood. General Wood offered this advice for dealing with the Moros: “Every concession to them is a mistake.”

Cutting off or exhausting the war-making capability of the Moro insurgents was a much more difficult task to accomplish than it was against the American Indians or the Aguinaldo insurgents because Moros lived at jungle poverty-level and their main weapons were blowguns/poisoned darts,  swords, and spears. Regeneration/resupply of war materiel for the Moros was not a problem for them, since their war-making needs were so primitive as well as self-sustainable. However, the history of the Moro conflict does provide a possible explanation why their war-making was finally arrested after 13 years of fighting.  Conducting battles against the U.S. Army’s repeating weapons was extremely costly for the Moro society in terms of massive tribal deaths, which slaughtered “datus” (tribal chiefs) and followers alike, and was eventually recognized by all but the most fanatical Moros as futile.

While it is an inference that the huge and repeated massacres of Moros caused them to rethink the value of their unending sacrificial defeats, it is fact that every battle turned into a bloodbath, with the Moros constantly drowning in their own blood. And further, it is a fact that tribal battles against the U.S. Army finally ceased after so many years of Moro bloodshed, which failed to stop the U.S. from extending its presence and authority over their tribal areas. So, one conclusion that can be reasonably inferred from Moro conduct regarding the curtailment of primitive tribal insurgencies, which are not dependent on outside resupply, is that, if large numbers of insurgents can be killed frequently with no apparent advancement of the insurgent cause, the motivation for insurgent war-making may be undercut. However, it must be recognized that, if the repeated, massive bloodletting was in fact the actual cause of the cessation of Moro tribal attacks on U.S. forces, even that required 13 years of military persistence.

A survey of American counterinsurgency cannot omit U.S. experiences in Latin America, and particularly in the Caribbean. American troops have been intervening in Mexican and Central American politics since 1836. Repeated U.S. troop forays were made into Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Panama in the name of Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the Platt Amendment, and Dollar Diplomacy, to cite the more celebrated reasons. However, it was the construction of the Panama Canal (1904-1914) and its subsequent defense that turned U.S. reasons for Caribbean military interventions from the abstract to the concrete. The U.S. military strategic reasoning was easy to understand. The ability of the U.S. Navy to rapidly move war ships between Atlantic and Pacific was an invaluable strategic capability, which was particularly dependent on control of the eastern approach to the Canal through the Caribbean.

At the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. naval planners had continuing apprehension over the possibility that a European power, and more specifically Germany, would establish bases in and around the Caribbean that would enable them to stage naval attacks on U.S. shipping, the Panama Canal, and American coastal cities. The way the danger would unfold as perceived by American strategic military planners was for a foreign power to take advantage of the frequent political instability of the “Banana Republics” to introduce their military forces under the guise of restoring order to the chaos, while their true objective would be to obtain strategic naval bases from which to launch attacks on American maritime interests. Therefore, the U.S. determined that it was an American strategic interest to stop Caribbean political trouble from getting out of control by intervening militarily before any other foreign power could exploit an unstable situation for their strategic purposes. Consequently, “send in the Marines” became the reflex American clarion call in the Caribbean as the importance of the Panama Canal continued to grow in an unstable world.

From 1899 on in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, the U.S. successfully suppressed insurgents over decades by establishing native constabularies under the officership of U.S. Army and Marine leaders who served as trainers and commanders. American military officers like Smedley “the Fighting Quaker” Butler, Herman “Hard Head” Hanneken, and Lewis “Chesty” Puller were some of the successful U.S. Marine leaders on the forefront of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts. Having the counterinsurgent forces composed of indigenous personnel who knew the culture and language of the insurgents was an enormous factor in these successful counterinsurgencies. Also, because there were no outside foreign powers that were fueling the insurgencies with money and supplies, when the insurgents consumed their war-making capabilities in operations, they weren’t easily replaced. Therefore, the scope of the insurgencies never outstripped counterinsurgent resources to defeat them.

One case where a U.S.-trained and led indigenous counterinsurgent force did not enjoy the same level of success as in other Caribbean efforts occurred in Nicaragua against the legendary guerrilla leader, Augusta Cesar Sandino. Sandino’s success in evading capture, while staging punishing ambushes against U.S. Marine-led Nicaraguan government forces from 1927 to 1933, can be traced to the fact that Sandino was better at his craft of insurgency than were the leaders who were matched against him at their craft of counterinsurgency. Also, Sandino enjoyed another advantage that other Caribbean insurgent leaders did not — outside support funneled to his organization. The 500-mile border area with Honduras where Sandino headquartered his forces was too remote and vast to be effectively patrolled to interdict contraband aid to Sandino from anti-American elements in Mexico, from the Communist International, “Comintern,” and from leftist “pro-Sandino” committees that took root in both Latin America and the United States. In the United States the Daily Worker and The Nation publications solicited money for “medical supplies” for Sandino’s insurgents. The Sandino insurgency was the exception that proves the rule — insurgents who are resupplied by outside sources can maintain their war-making capability even when fighting an active counterinsurgency campaign against them. However, the bane of the world’s leftists, Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza, succeeded in killing Sandino and ending his insurgency in 1934 after all U.S. forces had departed from Nicaragua.

What changed in Vietnam?

After victories in the Indian Wars, the Philippine War (including the extended but ultimately successful fighting against the Moros), and the “Banana Wars” in the Caribbean, it would have appeared that American political and military leadership should have had the martial knowledge base to devise a winning strategy for defeating the Communist “insurgency” in Vietnam. Certainly analysis of the counterinsurgency tactics of Smedley Butler, Herman Hanneken, and Lewis Puller and the difference in results between externally- and non-externally-sponsored insurgencies should have made it clear that isolating the insurgents from domestic and foreign sources of war-making capabilities was the central condition necessary for the U.S. to prevail. However, the U.S. began fighting the Vietnam “insurgency” by pretending that the insurrection in South Vietnam was “homegrown” instead of what it actually was — a war of foreign aggression totally sponsored and supported by North Vietnam. Under the U.S. political leadership of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, North Vietnam’s sponsorship of the war in the south was treated ambiguously; that is, the U.S. Government extensively publicized the activities of the southern-manned Viet Cong as the cause of the conflict, while not emphasizing that there were war supplies and North Vietnamese Army personnel flowing into the south from Communist North Vietnam.

In 1962-65 the American people were treated to a deliberately confusing picture of the enemy situation in Southeast Asia. President Kennedy misidentified the main enemy as the Viet Cong and misled the American people that U.S. counterinsurgency forces, with the Special Forces’ “Green Berets” in the forefront, could preserve a democratic government in South Vietnam by fighting the war solely within the borders of South Vietnam. Communist North Vietnam’s role as the primary war sponsor was not denied, but neither was North Vietnam’s central importance in driving the war properly publicized.   Actually, Kennedy and his national security team was either cooperatively or unknowingly misled by Nikita Khrushchev’s January 1961 “Wars of National Liberation” speech that world capitalism would be conquered by world communism through insurgent wars in the Third World. Such was the Communist strategy to avoid direct nuclear confrontation with the United States.

Obvious to any knowledgeable international observer, Khrushchev’s “Wars of National Liberation” message was a declaration that the Communists fully intended to conduct these conflicts as proxy wars with clandestine Communist support. Therefore, since Kennedy was not an international affairs neophyte, I can only assume that Kennedy accepted Khrushchev’s “terms” of proxy warfare; that is, we would not identify the actual source of the war in order to avoid the Great Powers confrontation. As has been explained in the intervening years since the Vietnam War ended, Kennedy, and later Johnson, did not aggressively challenge the Communist fiction that the South Vietnamese Viet Cong, and not the North Vietnamese Communists, were the initiators of the war because they did not want to be forced by American public opinion to take action (like destroying North Vietnamese capability to sustain the war by bombing the Red River dykes and flooding much of the country) that would cause the Soviets and/or Chinese Communists to strike U.S. interests directly. Of course, the Kennedy-Johnson rationale that the Soviets and/or the Chinese Communists had vital national interests in North Vietnam was clearly exposed as a sham in December 1972 when President Nixon did everything short of bombing the dykes that was recommended to Johnson as early as 1964 to knock North Vietnam out of the war. Nixon’s unambiguous war escalation ended North Vietnamese intransigence to conclude an armistice because Nixon was finally doing the very targeting that the North Vietnamese had feared since the U.S. entered the war. The North Vietnamese always knew that the U.S. could have ended the war within weeks to months by bombing Hanoi rail and road logistical movement points, closing the Haiphong harbor by mining, and destroying the dykes and flooding the country, if Johnson had ever acquired the moral courage to stop the senseless slaughter of American GI’s in South Vietnam jungles. (I have written at length of the Limited War Doctrine in the context of the Vietnam War in the article entitled, “Limited War Doctrine: A Fatal Flaw.”

Is Iraq “Vietnam deja vu?”

Anti-Americans then, just as now, parrot “knowledge-free” judgments such as, “The war is unwinnable.” And in a sense they are correct — if we continue to fight in Iraq as we fought in Vietnam, we will not be able to win. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson invested a good deal of hype in counterinsurgency as the war-winning strategy, and in doing so, they were able to divert the American people’s attention away from the root cause of the war — North Vietnam. Today, as I write this essay, President Bush is hyping a "surge" that will apply our best counterinsurgency techniques in Baghdad and Anbar Province, while talking about the need not to lose in Iraq. Certainly aggressively engaging the Islamic jihadists by counterinsurgency is one necessary step in defeating this latest jihad effort but, as in Vietnam, the source of the war that must ultimately be destroyed in order for America to be successful lays beyond the borders. Any effort to artificially limit the war to Iraq’s national territory as the insurgents are fed war materiel and personnel from without, will fail. And it will fail because the insurgents know one thing. They know that War = Capability + Motivation. They cannot defeat America’s capability but they note quite well that defeating America’s motivation to war requires only perseverance and a willingness to suffer losses. America has in effect become the Giant unwilling to break lose from its own self-imposed restraints.

Foreign Affairs, National Defense, Foreign Affairs: Iraq War, Vietnam War

Read more articles by Tom Snodgrass