January 2005

Relearning Counterinsurgency: History Lessons for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terror

Thomas Donnelly
AEI

From West Africa to the Philippines, U.S. forces are engaged in low-level counterinsurgency operations in the war on terrorism. The classic definition of this term, given a century ago by a British soldier, remains equally applicable today: these are "campaigns undertaken to suppress rebellions and guerrilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are struggling against opponents who will not meet them in the open field."

Counterinsurgencies can be won, but they are often messy, frustrating, and open-ended. The modern American military, like all modern militaries, prefers large-scale, conventional wars--conflicts in which it is possible to leverage speed, precision, and technology to overwhelming and decisive advantage. It is a reflection of America's hegemony in conventional combat that our adversaries have been driven into the unconventional sphere. But in doing so, our enemy has chosen a style of warfare that has effectively leveled the playing field.

Although history is replete with small wars, the U.S. military has tended to deemphasize these missions in its institutional memory. It is therefore vital to reclaim the lessons of past counterinsurgency conflicts to shape our understanding of the present moment in history.

Brian McAllister Linn
Woodrow Wilson International Center
The Philippine War, 1899-1902

Military historians largely draw their understanding of warfare from large-scale conflicts between nation-states. Consequently, counterinsurgencies like the 1899-1902 Philippine War tend to be overlooked. The Philippines, however, provides the best case study for the kind of conflict currently underway in Iraq.

The Philippine War was a fragmented, regionalized war in which U.S. military occupation was resisted by a multiplicity of opponents, varying from island to island and province to province. In addition to Filipino nationalists, guerrillas included Muslim separatists, apocalyptic cultists, and criminal gangs. Most guerrillas were locals, drawn from the same area they were fighting in. This localization bestowed both advantages and disadvantages: While guerrillas could not train, hoard supplies, or coordinate large-scale attacks, they were resilient because they lacked a center of gravity. Thus, the destruction of a guerrilla band in one village had no impact on guerrillas in a neighboring village.

U.S. soldiers acted as governors, mayors, police chiefs, tax collectors, and even accountants, for the Philippines. Because American troops were garrisoned in individual towns over long periods of time, they learned the indigenous culture and thus, came to understand the guerrilla resistance. The U.S. military ultimately won because it waged a highly adaptable, innovative, and localized campaign that was geared as much toward rebuilding Filipino society as destroying the enemy. In societies like Iraq and the Philippines--divided by race, ethnic group, religion, and class--it is crucial to recognize there is no single center of power, whose capture or destruction can effectively end the conflict.

Colonel Robert Killebrew
U.S. Army (Ret.)
Vietnam, 1956-1975

The Vietnam War had four phases: the advisory phase, from the late 1950s to 1964; the big unit or attrition phase, from 1965 to 1968; the Vietnamization phase, which lasted until 1973; and the subsequent withdrawal of U.S. forces and the defeat of the South Vietnamese in 1975.

It is a myth that the U.S. military entered Vietnam ill-trained for counterinsurgency. In fact, the Army and Marine Corps were devoting considerable attention to guerrilla warfare in the early 1960s, and from the beginning of the attrition phase, the military was placing U.S. advisers in Vietnamese units. Although criticized by many historians, the attrition phase was necessary to beat back the Vietcong (VC), which was operating in regimental-size units in the countryside.

After the VC units were blunted, however, the U.S. military should have shifted to full-scale Vietnamization. Instead, the decision was made to continue the war of attrition, hoping that the North Vietnamese would tire of the conflict. What happened instead, in January 1968, was the Tet Offensive, in which the enemy came out from hiding, fought, and was destroyed. After the Tet Offensive, the VC was no longer a significant combat factor in South Vietnam, but this came at the expense of U.S. political support, which prompted the turn toward Vietnamization.

The U.S. military has a historical tendency not to take indigenous troops seriously unless they are the only forces in the field, and the South Vietnamese Army, until Vietnamization, had never been fully supported in its equipping and training by the Pentagon. They were second-class soldiers in their own country, and they knew it. But from 1969 to 1973, under Vietnamization, the Vietnamese raised some very good units. Nonetheless, there was a critical flaw in the process: the U.S. military trained and raised Vietnamese units to depend on the American, firepower-intensive mode of war. Thus, when Washington stopped re-supplying the South Vietnamese, they literally ran out of ammunition and were ultimately overrun.

There are perilous similarities between Vietnam and Iraq. Among them: that the U.S. government overestimated its ability to rapidly create effective indigenous forces; permitted porous borders and sanctuaries to exist, in which guerrillas withdraw and refit; and made gratuitous enemies among the population-almost an inevitable byproduct of large-scale operations.

Kalev Sepp
Naval Postgraduate School
El Salvador, 1979-1992

The U.S. military prevailed in its regional strategy for Central America in the 1980s with limited personnel and resources. It fought a counterinsurgency in El Salvador, where guerrillas were beaten to a draw and made to accept a negotiated settlement, while supporting an insurgency in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas were voted out of office. Democracy in Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala was protected. In Panama, a dictator was arrested, and elections were held.

The counterinsurgency in El Salvador was always understood in a broader regional context. The evolution of U.S. strategy can be traced through the commanders of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). When Nicaragua fell to the Sandinistas in 1978, the Pentagon was strictly interested in the defense of the Panama Canal. When General Wallace Nutting assumed responsibility for SOUTHCOM, however, he recognized Nicaragua as a Soviet intrusion in the American strategic rear. Without a guiding political policy and with a headquarters consisting of merely ninety-six personnel, he created a strategy to contain it.

Subsequent commanders maintained this strategy over the next twelve years. General Nutting's successor, General Gorman, quadrupled the size of SOUTHCOM and moved large military exercises from the continental United States to Central America, thereby deterring the Nicaraguan invasion of Honduras and implicitly threatening an invasion of Nicaragua. His successor, General Galvin, formalized SOUTHCOM's strategic objective as the democratization of Central America and the professionalization of its militaries--that is, their subordination to civilian authorities. General Joulwan used logistic surges to help El Salvadoran forces and thus convince the insurgents that they could not win.

During this period, the insurgents lost their ideological focus and their popular support.
Another contributing factor for U.S. success came from Washington. Because Congress demonstrated its willingness to cut off aid, the El Salvadoran military was forced to accept U.S. advisers, who were largely responsible for ending human-rights violations.

The memory of Vietnam also contributed to success in El Salvador, albeit in a counterintuitive way. Because higher-ranking officers were wary of jungle wars and counterinsurgencies, junior officers--mostly from special operations units--fought the war. These middle-grade Vietnam veterans understood that the key to counterinsurgency is to make indigenous peoples fight their own war. Field officers did not try to make El Salvadorans into a first-class, NATO-equivalent army; rather, they just needed to be better than their opponents. And while the enemy was never defeated in El Salvador, that was never the objective. Rather, it was to make El Salvador a free and democratic country--and this was achieved.

In El Salvador, as in Iraq, there was a lack of democratic tradition, a divided religious heritage, aid coming in through neighboring states, rampant government corruption, and a loose guerrilla network of anti-government and criminal figures who employed terror tactics. There were myriad mistakes: the El Salvadoran civil and military establishments never unified; corruption and graft persisted; stunning misjudgments were made by the El Salvadoran military leadership; and there were never enough U.S. advisers. Nonetheless, because the U.S. strategy was correct, the impact of these tactical failures was considerably blunted.

Steven Metz
U.S. Army War College
The Palestinian Territories and South Africa

Every twenty years, it seems, the U.S. military is forced to relearn counterinsurgency. There is a danger, however, in assuming that present counterinsurgencies are exactly like past ones. The differences are as important as the similarities.

Looking outside the American experience, consider the Israeli struggle against the Palestinian insurgency and the insurgency used by the African National Congress and Pan-African Congress to bring the white minority government in South Africa to negotiations. In both, a minority defined by ethnicity or race sought or seeks to remain in power in perpetuity; in both, the insurgency was the preeminent security threat to the counterinsurgents. Neither can be said of the United States in Iraq.

Nonetheless, there are salient strategic similarities between these conflicts: First, all are cross-cultural insurgencies. Second, in every case, the military disparity between counterinsurgents and insurgents is extensive and unlikely to be gulfed, making the latter dependent on psychological, terrorist warfare. By contrast, classic Maoist insurgency--while relying initially on guerrilla and terrorist tactics--is ultimately geared toward allowing insurgents to face their opponents in conventional, stand-up battles. Third, albeit only partly in Iraq, the insurgents have been able to cast the conflict as a liberation struggle rather than a national struggle for power within a nation.

The critical battle space of any counterinsurgency is psychology. In a liberation struggle insurgency, however, the efficacy of positive information operations is severely limited. No matter how many roads or schools the Israelis build for the Palestinians, they will never win their hearts and minds. Negative information operations--discrediting insurgents or pitting them against each other--are more likely to succeed. Consequently, it may be prudent to reconsider the American emphasis on winning hearts and minds.

In a cross-cultural insurgency, counterinsurgents need human intelligence more than insurgents do, and it is extremely difficult for them to acquire it. Although both Israelis and South Africans nonetheless had some successes, it was often through methods that might be politically unacceptable to the U.S. public.

The Israeli and South African case studies also suggest that sustaining public support for a cross-cultural counterinsurgency is extremely difficult. It remains to be seen whether the United States will have the stomach for a conflict that could last several decades.

History also suggests that decisive victory over insurgents is unlikely once their battle is perceived as a liberation struggle. The only way to blunt it, then, is by fracturing the insurgency's supporters, whether by turning them against each other or through a negotiated settlement with less extreme elements.

AEI research associate Vance Serchuk prepared this summary.