Insurgency Is Insurgency, No Matter Whether It's Found In Vietnam Or In Iraq?

Counter-insurgency is the rage (again). The lessons of Nam were forgotten by 2003. Now, the U.S. military is facing another steep learning curve. If this is (fair & balanced) historical revisionism, so be it.

FORGETTING THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM: Clear and Fold
by Lawrence F. Kaplan

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a picturesque college town just west of Harrisburg, couldn't be further from Iraq. With its coffeehouses, galleries, and charming side streets, it resembles nothing so much as Oberlin, Ohio, or Ann Arbor, Michigan. But the students who call Carlisle home arrive here not from holiday breaks, but often directly from Iraq, where they led U.S. Army battalions in combat. They come here to attend the U.S. Army War College. The students--most with graduate degrees, some with two tours in Iraq--have ascended to a place few officers do. The college only extends invitations to the Army's brightest stars, drawing from a pool of candidates slated for promotion to colonel and, in many cases, destined to be generals.

In the hallway outside a seminar room, a group of lieutenant colonels just back from Iraq marvels at the tactics of a brigade combat team that a journalist had seen in action earlier this year. Why is it, one of them asks, that reporters so rarely convey these feats? Do they not realize that U.S. forces have yet to lose a battle? The question, echoing as it does a refrain from the Vietnam war, reveals more than any answer could. If its operations do nothing to further a strategic goal, an army can win every battle it fights and still lose the war. If there was a lesson worth learning from Vietnam, this was it. But, while Army officers yield to no one in their tactical expertise, what they don't study much is strategy. "The military is precisely inverted from civilian life," says Stephen Biddle, who straddles both worlds as a civilian scholar at the War College. "Strategy is the occupation of a very few in the Army."

It is also, not coincidentally, the occupation of very few in Iraq. The litany of strategic blunders committed by the civilian leadership prior to the war--the failures to plan adequately for the occupation, to put enough troops on the ground, to contend with all but the rosiest scenarios for the war's aftermath--have been well-chronicled and rightly condemned. Nor has it helped that Donald Rumsfeld has spent the years since the invasion entertaining himself with tantalizing visions of a revolution in military technology, preparing to win the next war rather than the current one. But Rumsfeld's lack of strategic sense does not prove the Army's abundance of it, as many of the defense secretary's critics seem to think.

Unlike the failures of three years ago, today's failures have largely come in the operational realm--that is, in military operations designed to accomplish what is, by now, a clearly defined strategic goal: to quash the insurgency. Operations are what generals are paid to do. And, in Iraq, the job belongs mostly to Army generals who run Central Command, as well as the theater and ground commands in Baghdad. Bruised by charges that they hadn't deferred to military expertise prior to the invasion of Iraq, policymakers have allowed the brass an enormous degree of latitude. The generals, however, have performed scarcely better than their civilian counterparts. The problem with the Army's approach to Iraq hasn't been a lack of capability, but confusion--in the highest ranks--regarding the utility of force as an instrument of counterinsurgency. Traditionally understood, the path to defeating an insurgency runs through the population, without whose support insurgents can be forced to fight in the open. Securing control of the population depends, in turn, on guaranteeing its physical security and--through social programs, civic assistance, and the like--winning its "hearts and minds" (see Caroline Elkins, "Royal Screwup"). By contrast, a strategy that simply relies on killing insurgents may never eliminate the insurgency itself, whose ranks can be filled by new recruits from a supportive population--an outcome made more, not less, likely if the government employs a heavy hand during conventional operations.

Unfortunately, conventional operations happen to be the U.S. Army's specialty. Having been drained of blood and prestige in Southeast Asia, the Army responded by banishing "counterinsurgency" from the lexicon of U.S. military affairs. And, in Iraq, where the Army has spent nearly three years launching big-unit sweeps, relying heavily on firepower, and otherwise employing conventional tactics against an unconventional foe, it shows. In recent months, this has begun to change, as the generals respond to complaints that their tactics don't match strategy. But it's probably too little and too late. Too little, because, while Iraq may have come apart at the seams even with a viable counterinsurgency concept in place from the outset, the American way of war has all but guaranteed today's chaos. Too late, because, while the Army has been chasing insurgents back and forth through the same towns, patience with the entire U.S. mission in Iraq has nearly run out on the homefront, a battlefield that matters just as much as the one in Iraq.

The service schools, field manuals, and training centers that generate Army doctrine have always focused on winning "the big one." In The Army and Vietnam, his classic account of the Army's experience combating insurgency in Southeast Asia, then-Major Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. writes:

[T]he Army's experience in war did not prepare it well for counterinsurgency, where the emphasis is on light infantry formations, not heavy divisions; on firepower restraint, not its widespread application; on the resolution of political and social problems within the nation targeted by insurgents, not closing with and destroying the insurgent's field forces.

If all this rings familiar from Iraq, that's because it is. The Army's historical memory contains a gap. "After Vietnam," recounts retired Army Colonel Robert Killebrew, "the Army just walked away from unconventional war."

Understandably eager to put the most painful experience in its history behind it, and less understandably convinced that its conventional operations actually succeeded in Vietnam, the Army reverted to training for the conventional wars it knew best. (In this, it was assisted by canonical texts like Colonel Harry G. Summers's On Strategy, a selective reading of the Vietnam War in which the author criticizes policymakers for relying too heavily on counterinsurgency tactics.) With the exception of the early '80s, when it enjoyed a brief vogue during the war in El Salvador, counterinsurgency all but disappeared from the Army's vocabulary. So much so that, according to an unsparing report by Army War College scholar Conrad C. Crane, when instructors planning a course on the topic went searching for lesson material at the Army's Special Operations School during the 1980s, "they found that the staff there had been ordered to throw away their counterinsurgency files."

Returning to conventional orthodoxy made a certain amount of strategic sense during the cold war, when the Army's mission was to defend against a Soviet thrust across the plains of Central Europe. But, thanks in no small measure to the direction of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and the doctrine of overwhelming force named after him, the Army kept training for that mission, even after the Soviet empire collapsed. Field Manual (FM) 100-5, for instance, which was published in 1993, skims over insurgencies in three paragraphs. After becoming Army chief of staff in 1999, General Eric Shinseki prodded the Army into becoming a lighter, more agile force that could better tackle a "full spectrum" of operations, from conventional war to peacekeeping. But, says Lieutenant Colonel Jan Horvath, author of FM 3-07.22--a counterinsurgency field manual, which the Army finally issued 18 months into the war in Iraq--"most people did not see [counterinsurgency] in terms of full-spectrum operations." Indeed, FM-3, the Army's doctrinal cornerstone on the eve of war in Iraq, covers counterinsurgency in a single page.

There was, famously, a consensus among the Army leadership that they were being sent into Iraq with insufficient troop levels. But the complaint about numbers always rested on the assumption that post-conflict operations would be just that--stability operations, not a guerrilla war, where numbers actually count for much less than tactical finesse. Army doctrine for post-conflict operations maintains that a visible profile furthers stability, but, in an insurgency like Iraq, troop concentrations tend to invite more problems than they solve. Nor, in any case, did the Army translate even its own post-conflict assumptions into training. Noting that it did not generate a post-conflict plan until seven months after Baghdad fell, a study by Army Major Isaiah Wilson III, who served as the chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, reports "a collective cognitive dissonance on the part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it." Leonard Wong, a bright and energetic research professor who flew from base to base in Iraq to survey platoon and company commanders for a War College study, says, "There was no doctrine, no standard operating procedure, no guidelines, no manuals."

Until recently, then, Army officers in Iraq had a choice. They could rely on conventional Army doctrine, or they could rely on their wits. Those opting for the former at first took their cue from Central Command chief General John Abizaid and theater commander General Ricardo Sanchez, who dismissed the insurgency as "strategically and operationally insignificant." As such, they took an essentially conventional operational approach, one that favors big-unit sweeps, targeted raids, constant patrolling, ground convoys, and active force protection measures (i.e., liberal expenditures of firepower). Picking up where Sanchez left off, his successor, General George Casey, has offered more of the same, only at a faster tempo and with body counts. In its essentials, he has resurrected an approach tested and found wanting in Vietnam, where, rather than pursuing traditional counterinsurgency operations, the Army applied the same strategy of attrition it had used in Europe during World War II. (Asked at a press conference how he intended to combat the insurgency in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland famously responded with one word: "firepower.") So, too, in Iraq. "[I] don't think we'll put much energy into trying the old saying, 'Win the hearts and minds,'" ground commander Lieutenant General Thomas Metz said last year. "I don't look at it as one of the metrics of success."

But exactly what the Army's strategy of attrition has accomplished isn't so clear. "It's a pretty constant spiral," says an Army commander in Iraq. "To eliminate the [insurgents], you rely on force. But too much force alienates the population even more." Moreover, sweeping through towns and villages only to move on the next day allows the insurgents to flood back into their sanctuaries as soon as U.S. forces depart.

Even the lessons in unconventional operations that the Army prided itself on having learned in the Balkans have proved at best irrelevant and at worst counterproductive. "In insurgency, visibility is perceived as occupation," says Michael Vickers, a former Army Special Forces officer and a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "The patrols just anger the population." The patrols also routinely get hit, accounting for a large percentage of American casualties. As Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker conceded in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee last year, "Sometimes, the best way is to be less present ... exposing more and more of your formation to this kind of [insurgent] warfare may not be the smartest thing to do."

Having discovered this by themselves, many commanders at the company, battalion, brigade, and, in some cases, division levels have walked away from Army doctrine in Iraq, becoming, in effect, strangers to their own tradition. The results vary by unit, with officers singling out the 101st Airborne Division and the 3rd Armored Calvary regiment as having been particularly flexible. As an official quoted in a rand report, "Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq," puts it, "Some of these commanders have paid close attention to the lessons learned over the years [about counterinsurgency] and are applying them in theater but it is not division or battalion wide. It often is up to the individual commanders." Seated around a seminar table at the War College, a group of battalion commanders recount how they had to improvise on the fly in Iraq. Officers, for example, exchange real-time tips on unit websites like the 1st Cavalry Division's Cavnet. According to Lieutenant Colonel Jim Schultz of the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, which analyzes and responds to requests from Iraq, the center has fielded over 4,000 queries about counterinsurgency tactics.

And, to an extent not seen in previous wars, commanders in Iraq rely on "mission orders." The practice, really a philosophy of command, refers to orders that assign a purpose rather than the specific means to accomplish that purpose--the premise being that the officer on the front line has a better sense of the battlefield than the commander back at headquarters. And, in conflicts like Desert Storm--where tactics, operational schemes, and grand strategy all pointed in the same direction (north, in that case), and where what a captain had to do jibed obviously with what the president of the United States wanted done--it worked magnificently. What to do in a counterinsurgency without front lines isn't so obvious.

At the War College, the conversation turns to the fate of Nathan Sassaman, a disgraced Army officer profiled by The New York Times Magazine in October. The Times depicted Sassaman, who left the Army under a cloud after covering up abuses by his men, as something of a victim, reduced to making up rules as he went along because the Army never prepared him to battle an insurgency. The officers at Carlisle see no merit in his defense. But, absent any doctrinal framework for guerrilla warfare, relying on the Army's mantra of flexibility hardly suffices. Sassaman, after all, was plenty flexible, doling out funds to one village and surrounding another with barbed wire. "In counterinsurgency, there is a point beyond which reliance on mission orders amounts to an abdication of command responsibility," argues Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, an Army veteran of counterinsurgencies in El Salvador and Vietnam. "There is an array of doctrines, tactics, and procedures for counterinsurgency, and the Army today either does not have them or has not inculcated them in the ranks."

After combating the insurgency for nearly three years in Iraq, the Army is finally starting, slowly and fitfully, to incorporate these lessons into doctrine. Battalion commanders who prepared against a conventional enemy at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, prior to their first deployment to Iraq say that, when they returned to prepare for their second deployment, nearly all of the exercises involved guerrilla warfare. From West Point to the War College, the service schools have all added courses on the subject. As well as releasing a counterinsurgency field manual last year, the Army's Training and Doctrine Command has a draft counterinsurgency doctrine waiting to be approved, and, last month, a counterinsurgency school even opened in Iraq, which incoming company and battalion commanders will attend as soon as they arrive in theater. Meanwhile, at the top, despite Casey's insistence that "we're applying counterinsurgency doctrine to the situation in Iraq, and doing it fairly well," his approach is, even now, undergoing a profound revision. Tellingly, the shift comes as much at the behest of retired officers, think tanks, and civilian policymakers as it does from the accumulation of the Army's own experience. The impetus also comes from two reviews of military strategy in Iraq, one commissioned by Casey himself and one by U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad. Casey's review, launched this summer, concluded that U.S. forces "generally have it about it right," in the general's own telling. Khalilzad's review, also launched during the summer, concluded they don't.

According to officials familiar with its conclusions, the ambassador's team recommended that the military shift its attention to establishing and maintaining security in areas already cleared of insurgents. The shift has already been put into practice, as Iraqi units move into areas cleared over the past few weeks, with some U.S. forces staying behind as well, and civil-military reconstruction teams set to fan out across Iraq's provinces. The "clear and hold" strategy draws from Khalilzad's experience as ambassador to Afghanistan, where he employed similar teams, and from the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program in Vietnam, in which U.S. military and civilian advisers aided security forces and civic programs at the local level. It also draws from a campaign by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has been pressing for months to shift military strategy toward local security. Last week, the new approach was enshrined in official policy by the president himself, who, in his "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," committed the United States to a "clear, hold, and build" doctrine.

The administration's new thinking draws, in turn, from the work of Krepinevich. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs and in briefings with Khalilzad, the joint staff, and other administration officials, the retired Army lieutenant colonel has been lobbying for the application of an "oil-spot" strategy in Iraq. The strategy, which dates back to the Vietnam era, calls for securing limited areas of the country before spreading out to others, like an oil spot. From his Washington office, Krepinevich concedes that his strategy would require U.S. forces to stay in place for longer than the American public may permit. At this point, however, he sees no alternative. "Insurgents don't rotate out [of Iraq]," Krepinevich says. "They just get better and better."

Leaving aside the debatable merits of the clear-and-hold strategy--chief among them the fact that Iraq tends to be populated not by Vietnamese, but by Iraqis, whose sectarian rage no pacification program may be able to dampen at this point--the emergence of a counterinsurgency strategy comes as welcome news. But why didn't such a strategy emerge 30 months ago? Last month, for example, an excited David Ignatius revealed in his Washington Post column that General Abizaid and other senior officers in Iraq were reading Lewis Sorley's A Better War, the definitive account of America's improved counterinsurgency efforts in South Vietnam after the Tet Offensive. One can take this as evidence that the generals correctly grasp the nature of the war in Iraq, as Ignatius does. Or one might ask what the discovery of a standard text on Vietnam, without which no college course on the subject would be complete, says about the strategic literacy of leaders who get surprised by problems and then go read a book to resurrect a dubious answer from the past.

Tellingly, both Rice and Abizaid find that answer in the realm of technique, the tacit assumption being that what worked, or ought to have worked, in Vietnam will work in Iraq. What they seem to have missed is that the United States lost the war in Vietnam. While it is true that, by 1972, "the pacification program had essentially eliminated the guerrilla problem in most of [South Vietnam]," as the program's deputy, William Colby, recounts, it ended up being too little, too late. After five years of conventional operations to no end, public support for the war collapsed in 1970, and, in Iraq, it has collapsed even sooner. Today, according to CNN/USA Today/Gallup and Harris surveys, clear majorities favor complete withdrawal from Iraq immediately or within the next year. The war's managers, then, have become caught in a bind of their own devising. As in Vietnam, an effective counterinsurgency strategy requires time and patience. But, just as in Vietnam, Americans have run out of both. Had the Army employed its current approach from the beginning, it might have had a chance at winning the war in Iraq before losing it at home. But, as the war grinds into its third year, the clock has nearly run out. Which can only mean one thing: It's almost time to forget about counterinsurgency again.

Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at TNR.

Copyright © 2005 The New Republic

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