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

January 10, 2005

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. DONNELLY:  --special event, although slightly different from our normal AEI morning propaganda sessions in that we're actually going to try to have a discussion that may have many sides to it.  We promise never to do this again, but we're going to give it a whirl and see how it turns out.

My name is Tom Donnelly.  I'm a Resident Fellow in Defense and National Security Studies here.  Our topic today is, I think, the central one for what we've come to call the global war on terror, to use the President's phrase of about a week after September 11.  We didn't really know what that would look like when it first began, but we now have about three years' worth of experience at it, so we've come to view it certainly within the context or against the benchmark of traditional counterinsurgency warfare, and it's a fairly far flung war from West Africa to East Asia to the Philippines.  American forces are engaged at, again, what looks from a distance to be fairly traditional low-level counterinsurgency.

We're not the first people--this is not the first time Americans have been involved in this, but the sort of classic definition of such campaigns remains fairly accurate today.  They're meant to suppress rebellions, in the words of a very great British soldier, and guerilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are struggling against opponents who will not meet them in the open field.  Today, more than ever, meeting the U.S. Army or the U.S. military in the open field is really a longshot proposition.  Consequently, our opponents seek to hide in cities.  They used to hide in jungles, but these days, cities seem to be the terrain of choice.  But at any rate, in complex terrain to try to negate the conventional advantages and the technological advantages of our forces.

Of course, there are ongoing U.S. missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Although we didn't immediately describe them as such, they are now well understood to be counterinsurgency campaigns.  One of the things we want to discuss today is how and why counterinsurgency campaigns are won.  They can be certainly lost.  They can also be won, not by the insurgents but by the great powers, so to speak.  But they tend to be frustrating, open-ended, and messy, and politically messy, conflicts.

Although history is--the history of conflict is probably more represented by small wars than large wars, small wars have often, and especially most recently, taken a back seat in American military thinking.  It's a little bit of a stretch to say that the U.S. Army after Vietnam sought as much as anything else while it was rebuilding itself to forget its Vietnam experience.  That puts it a little too strongly perhaps, but it is illustrative of how for professional soldiers, and again, especially for the highly professional force that we've had for the past 25 years, low-level warfare has been its least favorite form of conflict.

So we're just going to go through the panel sort of in kind of clockwise order.  I'm not sure which way your clock should be facing, but we're going to start off with Brian McAllister Linn, who will discuss the U.S. strategy and role in counterinsurgency operations in the Philippine War of 1899 to 1902.  I'm very pleased to welcome Brian.  This is a book that I myself have read numerous times and he just happens to be in town.  Normally, he is a military historian teaching at Texas A&M, but he's at the Woodrow Wilson Center for a year writing a book on the American way of war, as luck would have it.  I think you'll find Brian's presentation to be quite masterful.

Following Brian will be Bob Killebrew.  I've known Bob for 15 years or more.  Bob's military career is quite a distinguished one.  He is a paratrooper, if not by trade then emotionally, and he is that rare combination of true scholar and soldier.  He retired as an infantry colonel.  His final command was the Joint Task Force Bravo and he commanded the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment.  Do I have that right?  I know if I ever go to Fort Bragg and I get it wrong, I'm not going to survive.

[Laughter.]

COL. KILLEBREW:  [Inaudible.]

MR. DONNELLY:  Third, we have Kalev Sepp, whom I know best as Gunner Sepp, who will speak about the counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador in the 1980s.  Gunner is a former Special Forces officer and now a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.  He's been in Baghdad off and on for the past several months as a consultant.  He's the coauthor of the Army's official Afghanistan study.  He's been to Colombia, to Nepal.  Gunner just doesn't like the Western world.

And finally, concluding and giving the sort of the strategic overview of the moment, I think, will be Steve Metz of the Army War College.  Steve has led the War College's efforts to revive the study of counterinsurgencies and his most recent monograph with Ray Millan [ph.] on 21st century counterinsurgencies is in the packets to take home with you.  It's well worth studying that, not while the conference is going on unless you can find the really juicy bits that you may want to ask Steve about, but--

It's going to take a while to get through the presentations and I'm going to ask the panelists to have kind of a brief rebuttal period when we're done, so we're going to do the usual order of business a little bit differently.  But we've got some time and we've got some really excellent presenters, and with that, Brian, will you please begin the proceedings.
DISCUSSANTS

MR. McALLISTER LINN:  As you know, historians have a bad tendency to say that, well, you can't apply the past to the present and then complain that they weren't consulted.

[Laughter.]

MR. McALLISTER LINN:  I will say that the idea that counterinsurgency is important now is a rather novel notion, at least in Washington, where ideas have a shelf life of about a year, year and a half.  I remember coming back down from Yale in, I think, '91 and thinking I was hot stuff.  I'd been with Paul Kennedy and so I was, oh, rise of the great powers, that was last year.  We're on to something else.

Well, most Americans are barely aware that we fought a three-year conflict in the Philippines, cost us over 1,000 dead, propelled the United States into being a world power.  I often wondered why this conflict and conflicts like it are usually ignored and this sort of broad context idea.  I think military historians and the armed forces and the people that study strategic studies, I guess, would have largely drawn their perspective on warfare from large-scale conflicts between nation-states.

In the United States, the majority of military writing and history, at least, is on the Civil War and World War II.  You can maybe push that back to the Revolution.  This is done in the context of nation-state warfare.  And even wars that don't really fit that pattern, such as Vietnam and Korea, tend to be crunched in there.  They're interpreted as nation-state conflicts.

And it's a type of war that the great military philosophers, you know, Klaus Vincent Gomminy [ph.], Alfred Thayer Mahan, you name it, have studied, and the result is that there's a conceptual framework for how to study them, okay.  You know what questions to ask.  What were the political and military objectives?  How do you assess the relative military effectiveness of the forces?  What were the capabilities?  What was the decisive campaign?  How can you assess the military leadership, and so forth?

Well, that's a good way of approaching nation-state warfare.  I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with it.  But it's not very helpful for looking at other types of warfare, and I think if there's a problem with much of the analysis certainly going into Iraq, it was that it was looked on as a conventional nation-state conflict and nothing else.  And I think there's a danger that if you approach war from the perspective of Klaus Vincent Gomminy, you're not going to ask the right questions.  Historians certainly haven't asked the right questions in the past.  And you're not going to really understand the war.

That's perhaps somewhat serious for historians, but it's much more serious for people who are actually fighting these wars or setting the policy.  I think the result is that analysts focus on the wrong targets.  They're not able to understand the results of their operations.  They pursue tactics often that work against their strategic goals.  And they're defeated even if they do all the things that would constitute victory in conventional nation-state warfare.  And I'm sure you've all heard that, well, we won every battle in Vietnam.  It's just that that wasn't the standard for victory there.

So I think that one of the best things the Philippine War can do is teach people that there's other forms of conflict, and I think it's the best case study we have for the type of war that's now going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Now, I'm biased, but I still think so.

In the parlance of 1900, the Philippine War was what was termed a small war or a pacification campaign in which the American military occupation was resisted by a multiplicity of opponents.  It varied from island to island and from province to province and even from village to village.  I would argue, and this is my thesis, first, that it was a regional war, and second, that the United States was able to defeat them in a large measure, not entirely, because officers recognized the regional nature of the war and were able to develop and implement counterinsurgency policies that worked at the local level.

Now, that's the thesis and I've got two books out of it.  What are the implications for today?

First, I think the Philippine War can teach a great deal about the type of resistance in these types of conflicts.  With few exceptions, studies of European-style conventional war tend to focus on the enemy's military forces and they tend to end their analysis when the enemy's military forces have been defeated in battle.  And in the mathematics of most military analysis, if you will, the end of major combat operations equals mission accomplished.  While that's perhaps a new concept, but it's actually not.  And too many military officers accept this.  Again, well, we won every battle in Vietnam, ergo, we should have won.

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and in most of these small wars, I would argue that in a country where the national government is so weak or so disunited or so hated that it has little popular legitimacy, the end of conventional operations can actually lead to a far more destructive and difficult war.

In a society like the Philippines in 1900, which is a society that's divided by race, ethnic group, religion, class, religion, you name it, there's a division there, there's no real nation-state and there's no single religious or political authority whose destruction or capture could end the conflict.  Rather, there's a very confusing and diverse chop suey, if you will, of different factions.  Most of them don't owe any allegiance to a Philippine national state.

And so the result is that the destruction of Aguinaldo's government and his army actually just removed one of the things that was keeping this violence and this tension sort of at peace.  And once it was removed, the place sort of exploded.

As in the case of Iraq, because American political and military leaders really didn't have any idea of the nature of Philippine society, though I think they had a lot more excuse then than they do now, they really didn't recognize the implications of the regional nature of the society on the conduct of war.  And for many months, you find, and again, this is probably no news to anyone here, that civil and military leaders really don't understand the situation and actually refuse to accept that there's a war going on.

What had happened is that in January 1900 is the United States had shifted from conventional operations, where it had been very successful, to occupation duties.  They started encountering resistance from groups that had no connection to the nationalist movement.  For example, in the Central Philippines island of Panay in the Vesions [ph.], you had a group of guerillas, Aguinaldo supporters that Aguinaldo had actually sent out there.  You had a group of Panaian separatists who--but more confusing, they claimed to have loyalty to the central government but actually they refused to pay taxes or to follow orders.  Then you had two other factions that had split off and sort of taken over various provinces and were running them as their own.  Now, who is the enemy and how are you going to deal with them?

Further south in Mindanao, the Americans arrived and there's almost complete peace in the Muslim areas because the Muslims had gone out and killed all the Filipino Christians that would have been nationalists.  So the Americans come in and just sort of it's a cake walk.  Later on, when they start messing with the Muslims, they have their own war, but at the time, they think it's great, very peaceful.

On the island of Samar, which is still a basket case, the major opposition is neither Philippine nationalist nor Muslim, it's a group of apocalyptic cultists that think the world is going to end and are at war with virtually everybody.

On the island of Negros, you run into the Philippine sugar growers who loved the Americans, because they were restoring order and they were restoring trade which had been cut off by the war.  And again, the opposition is a sort of peasant-based, semi-apocalyptic group that's going around burning down the sugar mills.

Throughout the Philippines, there are sort of armed gangs that constitute in a way private armies, some of them run by rich landlords, some of them maybe brigand gangs that have been in existence for decades and have had sort of a protection racket with the local villages.

And essentially, what you've got is a society that's fragmented and is falling apart.  And so the Americans are in the position of putting the society back together again, and the only institution out there the Americans have is their army.

So I think the first lesson of the Philippine War is it helps understand the nature of the resistance.  It helps get away from that mindset that the destruction of the enemy, the capture of the enemy leader, the capture of the capital all constitute victory.  In fact, it really usually doesn't mean mission accomplished.  It means the real war has actually begun.

And I think the second thing that the Philippine War can teach is some clues on how the enemy is going to fight, and I don't mean tactics but how they're attempting to defeat you.  Most guerillas were not part of a national army, okay, in the way--even with the way that the VC was maybe a part of the NLF.  Rather, they're locals.  They're drawn from the same area that they're fighting in.  Many of them are, in fact, tenants of the landowners and so they're sort of private armies.  They're fighting for local issues, sometimes land, sometimes religion, sometimes just family factions, which are incredible powerful in local areas.  And they used to be in the United States, too.

And their tactics are very much to avoid conventional war, you know, sniping, harassment, cutting up communications and then disappearing into the population where they become amigos, as the Americans derisively know them.

Their local power gives them great advantages and disadvantages.  It greatly inhibits their ability to coordinate their operations.  It inhibits their training, which is almost nonexistent.  It inhibits their accumulation of supplies, because most of these places are subsistence economies and it's very hard to get enough food to subsist a 20- or 30-man group permanently without extracting so much from the peasants that they want to turn you in.

It's almost impossible for them to stage a large-scale attack, for example, for logistic reasons as well as armament reasons.  And the Americans quickly learned that a few dozen soldiers can hold off virtually any type of attack the enemy can throw at them.

But the local nature of the guerillas also means that there's almost no, quote, "center of gravity."  You can destroy a guerilla band in one village.  It will have no impact at all on the village next to it.

It means they're very resilient.  If you move in a large occupation force, they simply go underground.  The minute you move out, they reappear again.  Only very late in the war when you have major guerilla leaders surrendering weapons does the resistance essentially end.  But weapons are far more important than bodies because weapons are what allows the guerillas to continue resistance, not bodies.

What I've seen also as an instructor is how the guerillas attempted to overcome their weaknesses in weapons and training and supplies and how they raised recruits, for example, how they collected taxes, how they secured information, all these dozens of other things that are necessary to sustain resistance and are often not seen in purely military terms.  Because they're usually residents, they have widespread social contacts with the local government.  In fact, most of the time, they are the local government in the places where they're active.

And they spend a lot of time--the guerilla leaders spend a lot of time establishing these local contacts.  Often, they're related by family or by pre-war economic relationships or fictive kinships, which are often very big in traditional societies.  Because they're not apparent, it takes the Americans a long time to learn things like god-parentage are really important, for example.

In the most effective places, and this isn't the majority, they establish what we might call an infrastructure, a sort of shadow government that parallels the American government with a mayor, a police force, tax collection, to replicate the American civil government's mayor, and often--well, not often, but in some cases, they're actually the same people.

And what the Americans have a hard time understanding is a mayor can cooperate very well to get schools and roads and social reform projects for his village and cooperate equally well with the insurgents to kill the American garrison.  That's not a problem, you know, conceptual problem, at least, for the person on the ground, the mayor who is interested in protecting his village, and that comes first.

Now, a second problem with local guerillas is that all the villagers know who they are.  The Americans might not be able to recognize them, but the villagers can certainly recognize an outside or someone from the wrong barrio.  So one informant can essentially destroy the whole structure.

And for that reason, the guerillas rely on terror to ensure cooperation, and there's an extremely savage and vicious terror campaign that's waged in the Philippines, as in Iraq, not primarily against the soldiers but against the collaborators, what were called the "Americanistas."  And, in fact, William Howard Taft, the colonial government in Congressional testimony says, it's what he calls the guerilla system of terror that is the major inhibitor to peace, not military problems so much as a police problem, if you will.

And that's why I think the Americans referred to their mission so much as pacification, because pacification implies the restoration of order and law and that's not necessarily a military mission.  It's a restoration of order.

The third thing I think it can provide is a lot of clues for how to defeat this type of resistance.  The Americans had to adopt counterinsurgency policies all the time to local conditions.  They constantly had to shift.  They had broad, general policies, but at the local level, they were always adapting.  Sometimes they were making devil's bargains with politically unacceptable religious factions to kill off other religious factions.

But they also had to keep in mind that their job was as much to rebuild Philippine society as it was to destroy the enemy.  There's always this process of conciliation and coercion that's going on.  At the highest level, the American military commander in the Philippines is also the governor, and one of the stories I think that's indicative of how seriously he takes this role is that he writes the law code, the civil law code, for the Philippines.

And that parallel responsibility goes all the way down to the most junior lieutenant.  You have brigadier generals who are also in charge of islands.  You have majors who are in charge of major towns.  You have lieutenants in charge of villages, and they're doing everything--mayor, tax collector, police chief, accountant.  You'd be surprised how many guerillas are busted by officers who can read the town accounts and realize that there's a whole lot of money somehow being funneled away.

I told that to West Point cadets, you know, that your accounting might actually be more important than your marksmanship, and they were completely stunned.  But it's an actually true thing.

American officers, if there's one word to characterize them in the Philippines, is adaptable and innovative.  I mean, they're very pragmatic and they'd probably be stunned to be called adaptive and innovative, but that's what they are.  They're stuck in one town for a long time and they learn the local culture and then they--they learn what the guerilla resistance is.  And it might not be our view of guerillas, you know, black-clad fellows running around with AK-47s.  It might be this religious cult.  And you can actually get the local priest and local landlord to go after him if you play it right and don't alienate them.

So I think there's a lot of things that can be learned in terms of how to deal with insurgencies, both how to understand them, how to understand what they're probably going to do and what their weaknesses and strengths are, and then how to deal with them from the Philippines.

MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you, Brian, very much.  I've got a bunch of questions myself, but I'll try to save them for later.

Bob, why don't you keep us rolling.

COL. KILLEBREW:  Well, my name is Bob Killebrew and I have the dubious honor of discussing the war that we lost.  When I called Gunner this morning to set up breakfast, he said, "I have to tell you, Bob," he said, "when you come to the Mayflower, there's a little demonstration going on outside."  And I said, I had no idea the war still attracted that kind of attention.

[Laughter.]

COL. KILLEBREW:  But the Vietnam War for many of us in this room, I can tell from the gray hair, is not just history.  It's a part of the life we lived through.  So let me quickly walk you through a chronology, if I can, and then talk a little bit more about what I think were some of the tipping points in the war as the history is beginning to come back to us now.  And then I'll talk just very briefly and a little off my slate here about some of the relationships I see between Vietnam and current events.

Vietnam had--for us, it had four phases, roughly, the advisory phase that starts in the early-late '50s and goes to about '64, the big unit or attrition war phase that starts in about '65 and goes to about '68 or mid-'69, the Vietnamization phase that starts under Nixon that goes to '73, and then our withdrawal in '73 under a treaty that we forced on the South Vietnamese, our withdrawal of support for the South Vietnamese and final defeat of the South Vietnamese government in '75.

Eight years of war for the United States, a long time, probably longer than any military man had a right to expect we could maintain support for a war like that in this country, although even at the very end, support for the war--at the end of our involvement, support for the war among the American people, for the troops and the war, was still surprisingly high.  I'd offer to you that one of the myths about Vietnam is that the American people won't stand a long war.  They actually stood Vietnam a long time, longer now, the histories are showing us, longer than we realized at the time.

When we went into the war, there's a conception that the United States did not understand the war it was going into, and I think that's incorrect.  I was a--I graduated the Citadel in '65 and I took summer camp in '63 at Fort Bragg, and for some time before that, being an Army brat, I was aware that the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps were studying counterinsurgency war.  It was a big deal in the armed services of the early '60s.  Every thinking officer I knew and some maybe some of you knew were reading Mao and Che Guevara and the Griffith book on Mao and the lessons of counterinsurgency.  Every military post had its little combat town that looked remarkably like a Vietnamese village and we were all learning cordon and search.

The services--when we entered the big war phase in Vietnam, my memory is, and I believe the history supports, that the services had embraced the idea of counterinsurgency and they had--[break in recording]--counterinsurgency operations.  We were at the time, in fact, from the very beginning, putting advisors--continued putting advisors into Vietnamese units, even as the big war was going on.

And the attrition war which today gets some heat from historians has to be seen in the context of the times.  When we started introducing major conventional forces into Vietnam in '65, as I recall, the Marines and then the 173rd, the Viet Cong were already operating in regimental-size units in the countryside and the South Vietnamese army, which had not been well supplied by us and was, in fact, not well supported by its own government, was simply helpless to fight the main force Viet Cong.

So I remain a kind of an unapologetic supporter for the initiation of the large war of attrition.  At that time, it was necessary.  We all felt, and I believe the historians would agree, that at that time, the VC were moving to one of the final stages of large-unit war against South Vietnam, and at the time U.S. forces went in the attrition war, the big-unit war, let's call it, was necessary for a time--for a time.  And the question was, for how long a time?

After the Viet Cong offensives were initially blunted in about '66 maybe to '67, we probably should have shifted at that time, if we had not before, to full-scale Vietnamization, but we did not.  And the decision was made by Mr. Westmoreland and by the authorities back here in the United States that the way that we would ultimately defeat the insurgency was by attrition.  If we killed enough North Vietnamese soldiers when they came south, eventually, they would not be able to sustain the war.  In the parlance of the time, they would recognize the signals and be dissuaded from further combat.

Well, we know now that didn't happen.  What did happen in January of 1968, at the end of January, is the Tet offensive in which the North Vietnamese in South Vietnam and the Viet Cong came out in full-scale warfare, I think seized something like 13 out of 16 provincial capitals, overran the U.S. embassy briefly in Saigon, and were, I might add, murdered by the caseload by an enraged South Vietnamese army that finally found its footing during that campaign and by the U.S. after we recovered.  I don't think anybody will ever know what the final cost was to the North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese.  I've seen numbers up to 40,000 or 50,000 killed.

What is true is that after the Tet offensive, the Viet Cong were no longer a significant combat factor in South Vietnam.  I entered my first tour in '69 listening to all the war stories from '68.  I don't think I ever encountered Viet Cong in both tours there.  It was always North Vietnamese army that we were fighting in the south.

I'll come back to Tet of '68 in a second, but after Tet of '68, the political conditions in this country required Mr. Nixon when he was reelected--when he was elected--to reevaluate the strategy.  Mr. Nixon and by that time Mr. Abrams, the commander in South Vietnam, elected to go with what I call the fourth phase of the war which was Vietnamization.

Now, there's a thing about U.S. soldiers and soldiers of other countries that seems to be true and it is that when U.S. forces are engaged in combat, regulars being regulars and Americans being Americans, we have a tendency not to take the local troops that we raise and train very seriously unless they're the only thing in the field, as Gunner will talk about.  And the South Vietnamese army in the war up until the time Vietnamization started had never really, I think, been treated with much seriousness by the United States.  In many cases, there were reasons for that, and many of us who served in Special Forces served with the mountain yards who did not--they don't have a high opinion of the Vietnamese as fighters.

But I think the fundamental problem--the two fundamental problems was the government of Vietnam had not itself gone onto a full war footing until after Tet of '68 and the United States had never wholeheartedly supported equipping, training, and sending our best people to advise the South Vietnamese government.  They were second-class soldiers in their own country and they knew it and we treated them as such.

But after Vietnamization got into full swing, from about '69 to '73, the South Vietnamese raised some very good units.  I happen to have served in one.  In '73, I had the pleasure of--the honor of serving in the South Vietnamese Airborne Division, and many of those units turned out to be, with our support, fully as good as or better than the North Vietnamese units they encountered.

There was a flaw, and the flaw was that we trained and raised those units to depend on the American concepts of the use of firepower to resolve tactical fights.  Airpower and artillery were our main weapons in Vietnam and we trained the South Vietnamese to fight the same way.

By doing so, then when we left in '73, in February '73 when the cease fire was established, the terms of the cease fire were that both the North and the South would cease to be resupplied by their sponsors, the forces would freeze in place, and a coalition government be established between the Viet Cong in South Vietnam and the South Vietnamese government.

Well, in fact, the resupply by the North never stopped.  It paused briefly to see what we would do and then resumed.  We stopped.  The South Vietnamese army units that had been raised on a firepower-intensive mode of warfare had some trouble with ammunition resupply.  And by the time the South Vietnamese started their final offensive in 1975, the South Vietnamese were rationing artillery down to the point of one or two rounds per gun per day.  Although it is absolutely true that the South Vietnamese army in the Bamituit [ph.] region, when attacked by a Viet Cong corps split, partly because of a bad decision by the corps commander, fell apart and Vietnam fell, I think within the space of about two weeks once the campaign started and South Vietnam ceased to exist as a country.

What were the tipping--that's a quick history.  What were the tipping points in the war?  And then how can we apply them to the war we're facing today?

I think there were probably four in the war there.  One was clearly the introduction of American forces that beat back the Viet Cong offensives of '64 and '65.  Had that not happened, there would not have been, in my opinion, a South Vietnam in 1967.  The South Vietnamese army was clearly incapable of holding its own in the field and the United States, both with Army and Marine forces, were able to hold the wall while the South Vietnamese rebuilt.

Second, clearly Tet of '68, and I'll probably talk more about that in a second and then perhaps when we get to the Qs and As.  Tet of '68 did for us militarily what we had been unable to do.  It caused the enemy to come out of his holes and fight in South Vietnam and he was destroyed.  It also, however, unhinged the U.S. government, partly because of the media presentation of the way it happened, and by the way, those of you in the media in this room who know me know I don't blame the media for that at all.  They simply portrayed what they saw happening.  But it hit a United States that was unprepared for those pictures and a government that was unprepared for this kind of offensive.

The third tipping point was Vietnamization.  And even after the United States had clearly signaled that it had come just about to the end of its patience with Vietnam, the Vietnamization came very, very close to working.  I can tell you that--this is personal experience--in 1973 when I went back, it was an absolutely different country, and every veteran I've run into who had the same experience--who was there at the time had the same experience.  By 1973, South Vietnam was an operating country by every definition of the word.  The government was working at the province level.  The army was solid.  People were going to work.  There were voting rolls.  Vietnam had a chance in '73.  So I think the decision to Vietnamize and then the effort we put behind it was a tipping point.

And then, of course, the last point was the decision we made not to resupply the Vietnamese after the war resumed.  It caused probably what was inevitable anyway, the collapse of South Vietnam.

Now, I will just talk briefly about--briefly to the similarities, and I'm going to plagiarize, as any good academic does--or any bad academic, for that matter--from a paper written from a fellow who was one of the fellows on the embassy roof in the evacuation who had the unenviable task of lying to the Vietnamese who had supported him for a year and saying, "No, no, I'm going on the first helicopter.  There'll be a second one," knowing full well there wasn't going to be.  And he sat down a while back and wrote a thought paper on the similarities between the two wars, between the war now in progress and the war in which he fought and here are some of his points.

His nominations for similarities between the two wars:  Waste valuable time by erroneous strategic thinking, thereby causing the American people to tire of the effort early on.  Jeopardize the outcome of the war by overestimating our ability to rapidly create effective indigenous forces.  We thought we could stand up to South Vietnamese faster than we could, although we eventually did.  We may be about to make that same mistake in Iraq.

Permit porous borders and sanctuaries to exist in which the guerillas can withdraw, refit, retrain, and come back at you again.  Make gratuitous enemies among the population, which is almost an inevitable byproduct of large-scale operations.  In my opinion, you cannot expect a soldier who is engaged in a life and death fight to be especially careful of the property rights or the dignity of the people he bumps into in the hallways.

Sacrifice your ally in the name of what is deemed the more critical strategic priority.  That's probably a little bitterness on the part of Stu.  But in the end, Mr. Nixon decided that the game in Vietnam was not worth his relationships between the Soviet Union and China, hence his reasons for imposing the truce on Vietnam.  And my concern would be that in the name of fighting a more effective war on terror, we decide that the game in Iraq is not worth the candle, if indeed it is fightable now.

MR. DONNELLY:  [Inaudible] Bob.

Gunner, over to you.

MR. SEPP:  Thanks, Tom.  Some of you may have noticed this weekend a story that broke about Iraq that the Pentagon is supposedly considering something called the Salvador option.  According to what I was able to pull off the Internet about it, the Salvador option consists of U.S.-trained desk squads to be sent out to kill insurgents and their supporters.  And a U.S. military officer in the Pentagon is supposedly--who was supposed to be familiar with this debate said words to the effect, "We need to punish the Sunni population for supporting the insurgency."  This is a distorted legacy of the war in Salvador.

What Tom asked me to do was to answer a question about why did the U.S. prevail in El Salvador in their 12-year-long civil war, from 1979 to 1991, and the short answer is because the strategy worked.  The strategy was to achieve democratization and the ending of the wars in Central America with limited application of personnel and resources.  And this is what occurred, and El Salvador can't really be discussed discretely.  It has to be considered as a regional conflict.

Honduras was protected.  Elections were held.  Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were voted out of the presidency.  In Panama, the dictator was arrested and elections were held.  Costa Rica maintained its democracy.  Guatemala did not regress.  In El Salvador, the insurgents were beaten to a draw and convinced to accept a negotiated settlement.  The El Salvadoran armed forces were likewise convinced to accept that.  And in Belize, Belize was protected from Guatemala by a flight of British Harriers and a battalion of British infantry.  So it all worked out.

The components of the strategy were that--the two major components involved fighting a counterinsurgency in El Salvador and supporting an insurgency in Nicaragua, and the strategy began with the comprehension of El Salvador in the context of a regional campaign, which was then further set in the context of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

And it begins in 1978, and this can be traced through the commanders of Southern Command, once called CINCs.  In 1978, when Nicaragua fell to the Sandinistas and there was civil war beginning in El Salvador, the regional strategy was solely defense of the Panama Canal in order, of course, to support a third world war against the Soviets.  General McAuliffe was the Southern Command Commander at the time, and for him, Chile was the number one priority in all of Southern Command.

The difference came when Wally Nutting became the CINC.  His number one mission that he had been told was to implement the new Carter-Torrijos treaty, the Panama Canal treaty.  But he arrived as a strategist and he had been trained as a strategist and served as such and on arrival, he saw Nicaragua as the key to all the problems in the region and that it was a Soviet intrusion into what, to use Soviet parlance, the American strategic rear.  Now, he was mocked for this at the time as being alarmist.  But for the most part, his assessment was essentially correct.

Without a guiding political policy from Washington, he created a strategy to contain Nicaragua.  He did this with a Southern Command headquarters totaling 96 personnel.  There were a great many things that still slipped at that time.  The famous Warner Report, where Brigadier General Fred Warner had gone to assess the state of military operations in El Salvador and resulted in what became the basic military aid guide for the next ten years, occurred without General Nutting having any knowledge of him coming or going from El Salvador.  The Contra operation was put in place here in Washington without General Nutting's knowledge and was implemented without his knowledge.  He learned about it just a few months before he left command.

Therein begins now a succession of these commanders who remarkably, for all the differences in their personality, maintained this strategy throughout for the next--for this 12-year period.

Paul Gorman follows Wally Nutting.  He was a member of the restricted interagency group that crafted the Contra operation.  While he's the CINC, he over-watches the Contra effort on a daily basis.  He follows platoon-level operations in El Salvador.  He insists on tactical briefings every morning.  Members of his staff recall him having done almost exactly the same thing when he was a brigade commander in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam.  He quadruples the size of SOUTHCOM headquarters, and most notably implements a CONUS-based support system because he can't get the resources any other way allocated to SOUTHCOM per se, but he can task them on a sort of a rental basis out of the United States, particularly intelligence services.  He also institutes an exercise program and moves large exercises that used to be conducted inside the borders of the United States be conducted in Central America, and this both deters the Nicaraguan invasion of Honduras and implicitly El Salvador and also threatens an invasion of Nicaragua, which was exactly what Gorman intended.

Following Paul Gorman, Jack Galvin became the CINC, and most significantly, he codified the language of the objective, the democratization of the regional government in Central America--

[Break between sides of recorded tape.]

MR. SEPP:  --the military, that is, the subordination of the Latin American militaries to civilian authorities.

Fred Warner came next.  The author of the Warner Report as a brigadier general returns as a full general, and he made El Salvador his number one priority as a CINC until the successful completion of the 1988 elections in El Salvador.

But before he can implement his other plans for the region, he's relieved by then-Secretary of Defense Cheney over the Panama policy.

Max Thurman is then taken off of retirement leave and recalled to active duty, first to solve the Noriega problem, and then secondly, he understands that there is a new priority, which is the drug war.  El Salvador is important to Thurman and he does nothing to disrupt this line of strategy that's followed so far, but at that point, he already assesses that the Salvadoran civil war is a stalemate and he's interested only in maintaining it at that level.  He has to leave command after nine months because of failing health.

And then he's followed by General George Jowan, who reverses this and makes El Salvador his number one priority.  He said it's done for obvious reasons.  He never states these.  I think it was because of the--it was a shooting war, which he recognized and probably had a sense for how he would deal with it.

What he actually contributes to the war and, well, maintaining the strategy is logistics surges, which he manages to do even during the 1991 Gulf War, that as the Salvadoran armed forces lose helicopters and come short on aviation fuel and ammunition as they're fighting the counterinsurgency, he immediately replaces these and this helps convince the FMLN guerillas that they can't defeat the ESAF, the El Salvadoran Armed Forces militarily.  And then, of course, concurrently with this, over the previous 12 years and as in Colombia today, the insurgents lost their ideological focus and along the way their popular support.

Now, there's some strategic background at the same time.  General Jack Vessey, who was President Reagan's Chairman of the JCF, pays very close personal attention to Central America despite complete disinterest inside the Pentagon.

Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger is actually a very pragmatic man.  He actually issues the so-called Weinberger doctrine and says that the United States won't engage in a war unless there's vital national interest, the use of overwhelming force, and such, but is very closely engaged with the war in El Salvador.

Congress is very important in all this.  They turn on and off the tap of military aid to El Salvador, the counterinsurgency on the one hand and then the contra insurgency on the other, all through the 12 years, but this forces the Salvadorans to accept U.S. advisors, who are then in turn the advisors directly responsible for, more than anything else, ending the human rights violations, which is a sterile way of saying the murder of civilians by the Salvadoran armed forces who are suspected of supporting the insurgency.

The State Department plays an important role.  After the policy was finally established a year and a half into the Reagan administration, catching up with Nutting's strategy, the policy is stable from 1982 through the end of the wars and after the removal of Ambassador Tom White.  There are excellent, generally excellent Department of State and Department of Defense cooperation.

Also in the background is Vietnam, and this contributes to the success in the counterinsurgency in El Salvador in a counterintuitive way.  The large body of general officers, flag officers, have taken the lesson out of Vietnam to stay out of jungles and away from insurgencies and this results in a benign neglect that allows a completely different class of officers, much junior in grade, colonels and lieutenant colonels inside the region and a new generation of captains and majors, mostly from Special Operations units, to conduct and fight the war.  And the lessons that the Vietnam veterans, these mid-grade Vietnam veterans bring to the fight is that you make the indigenous peoples fight their own countries' wars and don't do it for them.  But what the younger officers do that are serving as field advisors, often completely alone in remote outposts, is that you don't need to turn the Salvadoran army into a first-tier world-class NATO-equivalent military force.  They just have to be better than their enemies.

A noted World War II historian and now retired Army colonel challenged the idea of success in El Salvador at one point saying that you couldn't call it any kind of victory because the enemy was never defeated, but that was never the United States' objective.  The objective was a free and democratic El Salvador and a free and democratic Nicaragua and this was achieved and so it was a policy success.  And all the more so in El Salvador because of the enduring regard of the Salvadorans, including the guerillas of the FMLN, for the United States and the United States military advisors, which is evidenced today, years later, by the participation of the Salvadoran armed forces in our effort in Iraq.

Now, are there lessons from Central America and El Salvador for Iraq?  This is very difficult to compare, as Brian said, but there are some similarities.

In El Salvador, there was no democratic tradition and governance was by repression.  Even though there was one religion, in fact, it was divided in El Salvador between traditionalists and the liberation theologists, and those of you unfamiliar with that term, essentially, Jesus was held up as a revolutionary who supported armed conflict.  There were different ethnic groups and different interest groups, very much at odds with each other.  There was aid coming in to the insurgents from and through bordering states.  Inside El Salvador, there was an underdeveloped judiciary and rampant corruption.  The insurgents, the guerillas, were actually a loose network of several anti-government and criminal organizations who employed terror tactics, most notably assassination of public officials, particularly mayors, and attacks on police stations.

Now, there were a number of things that had gone wrong and were never fixed through the duration of the war.  The Salvadoran civil government and its military establishment actually never unified all through the war.  Corruption and graft in the legal system and inside the military were never wholly fixed.  There were stunning misjudgments--it's as charitable a phrase as I can use--made by the Salvadoran military leadership, particularly the murder of the Jesuit priests in 1989.

There really weren't enough U.S. advisors.  Even though it's become very fashionable to say, oh, 55 was just right, in fact, probably--what had been planned was four times that number and it would have been very, very useful.  The internationally supervised elections, supervised and certified elections in 1984 and 1988, did not end the war, but they did built government legitimacy.

So in all of that, what was done right?  I go back to the point about the strategy.  The strategy had a sound start and had the right focus.  It recognized that Nicaragua was the root problem.  The leadership, as evidenced by the passage of this strategy from commander to commander, were in for the long haul and the American effort persevered through four administrations.  The strategic continuity was maintained through the six regional commanders and there was this, as I mentioned before, something that comes up over and over again, speaking with the American military leadership from that period in El Salvador, the benign neglect on the part of the Pentagon.

The bottom line was it was not--the war was not won by the Salvador option with hit squads punishing insurgent supporters but quite the opposite.  Instead of targeting guerillas, the effort was primarily and centrally on gaining popular support for the government in El Salvador.  This idea by itself would find useful application in Iraq.

Thanks, Tom.

MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you, Gunner.

Steve, if you'll begin to draw some of these threads together for us, it'd be much appreciated.

MR. METZ:  I'd like to compliment Tom for holding this session.  The idea of relearning counterinsurgency is actually one that's near and dear to my own heart.

In 1995, I published a study at my organization, the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College, where I likened the U.S. Army's capability at counterinsurgency to a mythical phoenix bird that is born, becomes beautiful, dies, and is reborn over and over again, because it seems to me that if you look at American history, that's really the way that we have approached the capability of counterinsurgency.  I mean, you can make an argument that we learned it fighting the Indians in the 19th century.  We learned it in the Philippines.  We learned it again in Central America.  We learned it again in Vietnam, and so forth.

It does strike me that in recent years, we do seem to be operating on about a 20-year cycle.  As Bob Killebrew indicated, we kind of began to figure it out in the mid-1960s.  Then we figured it out again in the 1980s, developed a new doctrine, new strategies, new forces, new military educational leader development systems in the mid-1980s.  And here we are again 20 years later again relearning it.

My feeling is that this 20-year cycle is kind of good news/bad news.  It's good news because that means that when we relearn it, we still have people around that remember the previous incident, so we have this kind of collective wisdom we can bring forth, but it's bad news in that because we do have people still around, we have this collective wisdom, sometimes it can be difficult to not think that contemporary insurgency is kind of like the previous ones we faced, so kind of one of my own personal quests now is to figure out how much of what we learned in El Salvador and Vietnam and other places we need to forget as we face the Iraqi insurgents, the Afghan insurgents, and Al Qaeda and how much of it we need to remember.

The mission Tom gave me for today is to cull history to help us better understand the current conflicts that we face.  You know, I certainly believe that learning from history is a wonderful thing, but it's also filled with traps.  In particular, it's important and difficult to select the right analogies because any analogy you select, someone can say that that's so different than what we face today that there's no reason to pay attention to it.

With many analogies, I think the differences jump out more than the similarities, and that's certainly true for the cases I've picked to try to mine for lessons today, because what I did was to try to look outside the American experience and I looked at a couple of different examples to try to see what I could pull out of that.  The examples that I decided to look at were the Israeli struggle against the Palestinian insurgency and the insurgency which the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress used to bring the white minority government in South Africa to the point of negotiations.

Both of these are ones where the differences really do jump out.  I mean, after all, both of these were cases where a minority defined by ethnicity or race sought or seeks to remain in power in perpetuity and it's certainly not true that that's what the U.S. seeks in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other parts of the world where the global insurgency against Al Qaeda is taking place.

Another difference that jumps out in these cases is that for both the white minority government in South Africa and for the Israelis, the insurgency really was clearly their preeminent security threat they faced.  They could really focus their efforts on that.  For the United States today, the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and against Al Qaeda are certainly very, very important, but we have lots of other security challenges, threats, and responsibilities, as well.

So there are some really stark differences between these historic examples and what we face today, but I am really convinced that there are enough similarities that we really can mine some lessons from them.  One way to have approached that would have been to look at the tactical and operational lessons, because if you look at the insurgency in South Africa, what the Israelis are facing against the Palestinians, those were campaigns that were heavily based on counterterrorism, they were campaigns that heavily took place in urban settings.

But I'm really not going to get into the sort of the tactical level today.  Other people are a lot more qualified than me to speak on that.  What I'm really going to try to do is to look for salient strategic similarities between these two cases and what we face today.

And as I think about it, I think there are three similarities that do make these useful analogies to look at.  First, like the Israeli and the South African insurgencies, the ones the U.S. faces today are cross-cultural, and I think this is really, really important because the fact that they're cross-cultural really shapes the psychological, the ethical, and the ideological framework of the conflict.  Cross-cultural insurgencies, if you look at them through history, are significantly different than intra-cultural insurgencies.

Second similarity, the military disparity between the counterinsurgents and the insurgents are very, very extensive and unlikely to be gulfed.  If you look at classic Maoist insurgent strategy, what it does is early on in the insurgency, it uses things like terrorism and guerilla activities, but the ultimate goal is to reach the point where the insurgents can face the counterinsurgents in kind of stand-up conventional battles.  I mean, in classic Maoist strategy, the end is a more or less conventional war.

If we look at the South African example, the Israeli example, and the counterinsurgencies that the U.S. is involved with today, whether the global one or national ones, there's almost no chance of ever reaching this point of conventional stand-up activities.  So what that means is that the insurgents have to rely on psychological attrition, the erosion of will, and they have to do this through a heavy reliance on terrorism.

A third similarity, and maybe the one that's most important of all, is in the Israeli case, in the South African case, and to some extent in the current ones we face today, the insurgents have been able to psychologically cast or shape the conflict so that it's widely perceived as a liberation struggle, at least within the nations where it's taking place and to some extent outside of it.  And having studied insurgencies most of my adult life, I really believe those that are perceived or cast as liberation struggles take on some very, very different dynamics than those that are seen as national struggles or struggles for power within a nation.

So given these three similarities, I think that there are four lessons that can be culled, derived, adapted from the South African and Israeli cases that have relevance for the current conflicts the U.S. faces.

First of all, it's vitally important whenever we think about insurgency to remember that the essence of any insurgency and its most decisive battle space is the psychological.  In the 1960s, insurgency was referred to as armed theater, which I think is a really poignant way of thinking about it.  I mean, it's theater in that you have protagonists on the stage, but they're sending messages to wider audiences.  Insurgency is about perceptions, beliefs, expectations, legitimacy, and will.  Insurgency, as we all know today, is not won by killing insurgents, not won by seizing territory, but it's won by altering the psychological factors that are most relevant.

Now, the U.S. has understood this since the 1960s.  I mean, if you look at our doctrine, our strategy for counterinsurgency, we've long recognized that the way you win it is you change the psychological structure.  You win hearts and minds, to use the old phrase.  And you do that both through concrete actions--economic reforms, political reforms--but you also do it through information operations.

But I think one thing that we can see in the Israeli and South African cases, and maybe even the current ones the U.S. faces, is that information operations in an insurgency that's perceived as a liberation struggle are very, very difficult, particularly what might be called positive information operations, winning hearts and minds.  Because if you think about it, I mean, think, for example, of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinian insurgents.  There's almost nothing the Israelis can do to win the hearts and minds of the majority of the Palestinian people.  I mean, they can build all the schools and roads and stuff like that they want to do and it's just not going to happen.  To some extent, that same thing was true for the South Africans.

The efficacy of the positive information operations was really limited.  Now, negative information operations, discrediting, eroding the credibility, the legitimacy of the insurgents, might have some impact.  But positive information operations were going to have limited effectiveness.  We see that in the two case studies I've chosen to look at, and I think that's something that we need to consider about American involvement in counterinsurgency today because so much of our doctrine, so much of our strategy says, win hearts and minds and do information operations, and I'm not entirely convinced that so long as this is cast as a liberation struggle that we're really going to have much success there.

Second lesson, everyone knows that intelligence and counterintelligence are really the keys to successful counterinsurgency.  It almost goes without saying.  But in a cross-cultural insurgency, human intelligence is always going to be extraordinarily difficult to gain and sustain.  What happens, for example, in the Israeli and the South African examples is the counterinsurgents needed allies and agents in the other group, but the insurgents less so.  The insurgents didn't need to have white South African agents or the Palestinians don't need to have people actually inside the Israeli structure for success.  So just kind of the point here is that human intelligence is particularly problematic in a cross-cultural insurgency.

Now, it can work to some degree.  Both the South Africans and the Israelis have had some success with it.  But often, they did this through methods that were unacceptable to Americans.  For example, in both cases, there were examples of cultivating human agents within the insurgents by threatening these agents' families, friends, and things like that.  So the difficulty here is the methods of sustaining human intelligence in a cross-cultural insurgency are in all likelihood things that the United States isn't willing to do.

Third lesson, and this touches on some of the points that Bob made, preparing the public.  Sustaining support for the struggle is extraordinarily difficult in the sort of cross-cultural insurgencies that are seen as liberation struggles.  Even in Israel and South Africa, where the counterinsurgents faced a challenge that they saw as threatening their most basic interest, there was a long-term erosion of will, particularly in South Africa.  I mean, what led to the success on the part of the insurgents in South Africa was the fact that there was this long-term erosion of will within the white community and there was no sign that anything was going to reverse that.

So it remains to be seen today whether the U.S. will have the belly for a conflict that may last one or several decades.  It's simply--to paraphrase it and put it in stark terms, it's not clear that time is on our side in Iraq, maybe Afghanistan, maybe even in the global counterinsurgency.

Fourth lesson, I think these two case studies as I mine them for lessons suggest that once an insurgency is perceived as a liberation struggle, particularly by outsiders, the only way to blunt it is by fracturing the insurgent supporters.  You've got to bust the insurgency apart if you're going to have any success.

You know, I think there are both positive and negative ways of doing it.  I mean, one way of fracturing an insurgency is to take part of its support base and accept them, empower them, negotiate with them, bring them into the government, break the insurgency's supporters apart that way.

The negative way of doing it is to find some way of turning the very segments of the insurgency against each other.  For example, in South Africa, there were times that they had programs where they tried to fracture the insurgency along tribal lines by turning to Xhosa, the Sutu, the Zulu components of it against one another.  So you have both positive and negative ways of doing it.

But to phrase this a little differently and emphasize it a little more, history suggests that decisive victories over insurgents is unlikely once a conflict becomes perceived as a liberation struggle unless you're willing to resort to genocidal levels of brutality, as in Guatemala.  The best that can normally be attained is a partial victory, a negotiated settlement with the less extreme part of the insurgents.

So with these four lessons, I've got to tell you, I'm someone who's not normally a chronic pessimist.  I tend to be kind of a glass-half-full people.  But when I look at these two particular cases, as well, and to the extent that you can mine them for lessons, to the extent that the analogy holds, the lessons really don't bode well for America's current security dilemmas.

The ineffectiveness of positive information operations takes away one of our primary tools.  The difficulty of human intelligence makes it difficult for us to have the sort of clarity that we need to operate.  Preparing the American public for decades of bloodshed will be extraordinarily difficult.  And finally, because we have cast the insurgencies we face as ones against terrorism or terrorists, that makes accommodating part of the insurgents, or fracturing the insurgents, I think, very, very difficult.  It kind of takes a strategy that's very often worked in the past, of accommodating yourself to part of the insurgents, simply off the table because you don't negotiate, you don't bring terrorists into the government.

So using strictly the Israeli and South African analogies, then, I've got to tell you it leaves me worried about the U.S.'s ability to successfully relearn counterinsurgency.  We can make an argument that the analogies aren't apt, or at best perhaps what we need to do is to look at some of the other analogies, the El Salvador or the Philippines to look for a little more hope.  Thank you.

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, Steve, there is one other option and that is simply to go back and look at the analogies again to make sure we extract the appropriate lessons rather than the pessimistic ones.

[Laughter.]

MR. DONNELLY:  Thank you all for really great presentations.  I want to do a couple of things in the sort of first redirect round.  Naturally, I have one or two things I want to toss out, but I want to invite the panelists to comment on other panelists' presentations briefly.  There's not an obligation, but if there's something that jumped out at you that you want to underscore or take issue with, here's your chance to do it.

But exercising the prerogative of the moderator, I have sort of one-and-a-half things I'm going to ask you guys to talk about.  If there's one thing that came through all the presentations is that, and Steve addressed it directly in his, was the question of time.  By its nature, counterinsurgency operations, at least in order to be successful, must be those where time is on our side.  And in some ways, this is the sort of Part B of the question that goes entirely against the trend of modern American military thinking.  In other words, rapid, decisive operations when it comes to counterinsurgency is almost contradictory or an oxymoron concept.

And in regard to that, one of the things that I'd like you guys to talk about is the effect of extended counterinsurgency operations on the forces that undertake it, both--because in some of your examples, it is a sort of volunteer conscript force, but I think particularly for the example or the situation we find ourselves in today, the question is one of professional long-service forces.

So with that multi-variant, multi-part question, I'd like to go just down the batting order one more time before we open the floor to Q&A.  Brian?
DISCUSSION

MR. McALLISTER LINN:  I have nothing to comment on the other three.  I will say that one could make an argument that the United States Army, particularly, has learned a great lesson from counterinsurgency every time it's done it, and that is that it doesn't like to do it--

[Laughter.]

MR. McALLISTER LINN:  --and it's preferably by hiding or sticking your head in the sand and saying, "We're not going to do it," and maybe you might be able to avoid doing it.

In terms of the level of time, the actual insurgency phase of the Philippines is actually pretty short.  I mean, the insurgency phase starts around January 1901 or 1900 and the war is effectively over by mid-1901, with the exception of four provinces.

[Laughter.]

MR.          :  Go figure.

MR. McALLISTER LINN:  And those are dealt with extremely brutally.  And unfortunately, the campaign in those four provinces instead of the campaigns in the other 68 are what you read about in your textbooks.

But the effect on the military is very, very strong.  First of all, you have a whole generation of new officers coming up who have almost no training at such small unit warfare and that creates an enormous problem for the regular Army, to integrate them into its concept of war, which is essentially fighting European nation-states.  And so there's this huge attempt to reeducate these junior officers which creates a great deal of trauma.

The second thing you have, and this is often not addressed, these are very unhealthy wars and you have a huge die-off in years after.  If you had taken the ten best officers in the Philippines, you'll find that by the time you get to World War I, where you could really have used them, almost none of them are around.  They've all been retired for medical reasons.  That's something I don't think is recognized.

The third thing, of course, is the morality, or let's be blunt, the torture issue.  American troops commit atrocities.  They even, believe it or not, court martial a brigadier general for ordering summary executions.  There's a widespread public outrage at this.  There's extensive newspaper coverage.  Even administration-friendly newspapers are upset about this.  There's even a Senatorial investigation.  In fact, I would argue they handle atrocities far more morally and far more rapidly in 1900 than they do nowadays.  And so that has a huge impact on the Army's sense of professional identity, you know, that they think of themselves as warriors and gentlemen and they have to deal with the fact that some of their people have committed atrocities and that creates a great deal of angst.

And last, they really think that these things, these wars, have almost destroyed their capability of fighting the major threat, which is, again, a European pure competitor, and that there's a great concern that they have raised, as I say, a generation of officers who have lost the skills.  They no longer have the equipment.  And if you'll see the famous root reforms are embraced by the Army in part as a way of getting rid of this counterinsurgency constabulary mission and going back and creating a real military, and that is the military that is eventually deployed in World War I, not the Philippine military.

COL. KILLEBREW:  Well, no army ever wants to fight a war, period.  It tears hell out of the training schedule.  It screws up their maintenance plan.  Reenlistments are hard.

But the fact is, and I'll be a little more serious here, no general ever wants to fight a long war.  All war plans call for short wars.  And why is that?  That's because military people, by and large, and I'm one of them, are conservative and we like to be in control of things, and the longer a war goes on, the less in control you are at the beginning.  You have to deal with many more unknowables as the war streams on.

I think Tom has asked a very, very critical question.  Time is the chessboard upon which wars are played and time can work like a chessboard both for you and for the enemy, depending on which one of you understands how best to play it.  At the beginning of the Vietnam War, you don't have any sense at all that the military leadership at the time understood they were on a time schedule.  And you have to go back in time to understand--remember the mindset of the United States in the early '60s.  We were clearly a predominant power.  We were generally a very united patriotic country.  We had almost inexhaustible resources, including manpower, and we spent soldiers over there like cheap change, as we did in World War II, Hamburger Hill a perfect example.

So there was no sense at the beginning of the Vietnam War that there was a time problem at all.  We were simply going to trick the enemy and kill ten of him for one of us and he'd eventually wear down.  The North Vietnamese understood the time problem better than we did.  Remember Yap's famous comment about he'll kill ten of us and we'll kill one of him and he'll eventually get tired first and he was right.

Nixon came in with a good sense of the time problem because the streets were alive by that time with demonstrations and the campuses were on fire.  The Vietnamization program, the comment that my pal made earlier, the Vietnamization program was pushed as rapidly as it could to give us breathing space to get out.  It was a move on the time board.  It was a knight's move to try to give us some space so that we could withdraw with some kind of honor and South Vietnam could survive and it damn near worked.  It damn near worked, but not close enough.

The question of whether or not we learned that question in Iraq is a good question.  We clearly went into that war with a sense that we were going to win it so rapidly time would not be a problem.  Tom's heard me say this before.  Rapid deployment operations is a tactic and not a strategy.  Our Army, as wonderful as they are, sometimes mistakes the two, and we certainly did in this case, not just the Army.

The next move on the time board will be the elections at the end of this month, probably the most critical event in the Iraqi war since the fall of Baghdad, the second turning point.  And then the next time play will become the elections until probably the summer, when we can see accelerated combat to protest or prevent the seating of an Iraqi government.  That will be the critical time scale upon which this war is going to be played and we will have a sense by next summer as to how well we have used that time or whether or not the other side has used the time more effectively than we have.

MR. SEPP:  During the Salvadoran civil war, I was asked by a, in discussing the war at one point, a high-ranking SAMS graduate, School of Advanced Military Studies, you know, the cornerstone organization for Army doctrine, he sort of snapped at me, "Well, what's your exit strategy in Salvador?"  And, of course, the point was that the success there derives from there not being an exit strategy or a time table for an end of the U.S. effort.

The idea of time in the Salvadoran war was set by Paul Nitze in NSC '68 and then George Kennan and his influence, that this was just going to take some long amount of time to contain the larger enemy.  And so if that effort, the Cold War effort, was extended, then the war in El Salvador could be treated as an extended effort, as well.

The effect on forces is a good and interesting question.  The Salvadoran forces had to go from 1979, a force of about 5,000 sort of parade ground soldiers who actually mostly functioned as muscle for the plantation owners to keep the labor unions in line to a force of 50,000 with an appropriate officer and NCO corps and logistics system to support weaponry like helicopters and jet aircraft.  This was managed after--it was functioning fairly well after about six years that it was running fairly well.  At about the seven- or eight-year mark, the Salvadorans began to feel that the American advisors were not necessary.  That's not wholly true, but they had gained a degree of confidence at that point.

That the U.S. forces were not affected by this is, I know on the one hand, fairly obvious, but no first-term soldier served in the Salvadoran war.  The body of the American forces--there were probably at any given time inside the borders of El Salvador about--it went as high as 115 on a given day.  These were serving professionals and were understood as such.

Some of you may remember in 1986 a Salvadoran outpost was overrun and an American Special Forces sergeant was killed.  For about 48 hours in the news cycles, it was the beginning of another Vietnam.  Soldiers were beginning to die in this jungle war in Central America.  And then the story absolutely evaporated because there was a difference.  Everybody understood innately.  The American people understood that there's a difference of their sons and daughters, teenagers, being sent to fight wars for vital national interests, for the defense of a nation, and the serving professionals that have elected to do this for their career, and particularly in Special Forces.  This is exactly the kind of war that they were supposed to be fighting in and these were the risks that they understood were involved.  So there was no--in that sense, there was no stress on the American--

MR.          :  Well, this should be for Steve, as well, both Gunner, you and Steven have done work in Iraq so you are not entirely constrained by your examples if you would like to offer brief observations based on your travels and your work in Iraq and if you see changes or the way that's affecting the force, you should not feel constrained to leave that out, if you want to--

MR. METZ:  The time issue is an extremely significant one.  If you sort of made a big list out of all of the insurgencies around the world over the last century or so and sort of listed when they started and when you can find a discernible end point, I think that the normal life span, to the extent there is one, or at least the average life span tends to be about ten to 15 years.  It doesn't mean it's huge military actions with the same level of violence throughout.  Very often, what happens is that they kind of peter out over a number of years at the end.  But ten to 15 years seems to be kind of the normal for an insurgency to really be solved.

But when we look at the U.S. military today, the way it's been phrased by other people but I think this captures it, is that we have configured our military to be a sprinter, and the best sprinter in all of human history, but now we have been drawn into marathons.  So, you know, sometimes sprinters can be good at marathons, but a lot of times, they need a lot of retraining to do so.

I'll certainly tell you that over the last decade or two, or the last decade at least, I've been involved in a lot of joint in-service war games that are set in--that are counterinsurgency-type one way or the other.  Almost invariably, the way these games were organized were such that they were over in six months or a year, you know, and I would often go to the game designers and say, you know, what's the deal with this because history tells us insurgencies last ten or 15 years, but yet we are developing concepts and thinking through ones that are over in six months or 12 months or whatever.  But the idea was that the American military and the American military war gaming system was configured for a sprint.

Certainly our military and Department of Defense leaders are grappling with this issue in Iraq and to a lesser degree in Afghanistan today.  There's a tremendous concern of the turbulence that it's going to place on the force, that there'll be problems with enlistment and reenlistment, that we'll simply wear out units and things like that.

Basically, we're trying to deal with this in four different ways, or four interrelated ways.  One is by increasing the number of what are called high-demand-type units, because, of course, when you have a protracted deployment that lasts over a number of years, maybe even a decade or more, the biggest stress is not on sort of your generic infantry or something like that but are on the high-demand units like military police, intelligence, Special Forces, and things like that.  So the U.S. military, particularly the Army, is doing some internal reorganization to try to increase the number of these units so that any given unit spends less time in Iraq or Afghanistan or something like that.

A second way that we're trying to deal with that is to make sure that when we do have one unit replacing another in a protracted deployment in a counterinsurgency, that the handover is as smooth as possible because the deal with the counterinsurgency is that it depends so much on the expertise and knowledge that deployed units develop.  I mean, you meet people, you learn what looks right and what doesn't look right.  You can walk through a town and you know something's up because it just feels or seems different than it normally does.  That's the kind of knowledge that it takes some time to build up.

In Vietnam, what we often did was to use individual replacements, I mean, rather than pull a division out and send in a whole new fresh division you'd have individual replacements.  That has a lot of problems, as well.

What we're trying to do in Iraq is we've really tried to refine the handover process of sending, like, advance parties from the unit that's going to deploy, the military intelligence people rotate on a different cycle, and things like that, and so we've tried to make the handover when we pull one unit out and send another unit in as seamless as possible, not perfect, but at least there's been some improvement.

The third thing that we're doing to try to add to this ability to keep expertise in the field over a long period of time is to make great use of contractors, because, I mean, you can hire a contractor and say, okay, you're going to be here for two years, three years, four years, whatever, versus just kind of a generic Army-Marine battalion or something like that.  So contractors give you a little more protractedness.

The fourth thing, and this kind of gets at a point Bob was making, is we try to get better at quickly creating an effective host nation allied military.  Bob points out that Vietnamization took a number of years to do it.  What we're trying to do, at least, is to be a little quicker at creating an Iraqi security force and an Afghan security force based on the lessons we've learned from the past.

Now, with all four of these things, there are finite limits in how much you can get out of any of the four of these, but the hope is at least that the four in combination will allow us to kind of sustain the effort without a great dip in expertise and effectiveness over a long period of time.

MR. DONNELLY:  It sounds like we're trying to not change the sprinter so much as build a really big relay team.

We're now at the Q&A part.  We've got about 20 minutes or so.  Remember the three crucial rules.  Wait for the microphone, tell us who you are, and ask a real question.  David, we'll start with you at the front and we'll kind of work from front to back.  I'll try to get as many people in as possible.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

MR. WOOD:  Dave Wood, Newhouse News Service.  One of the things that's been very puzzling to me, having covered, I think, the beginning of low-intensity conflict studies in the early 1980s, what happened to all that expertise that would run up to this war?  Where was all that expertise?  How come nobody spoke up?  How come nobody was talking about the lessons that you folks are talking now so that we knew more clearly at least in the public what the heck we were getting into?

MR. DONNELLY:  I think Bob gave me the eyebrow on that one.

COL. KILLEBREW:  Actually, I saw all four of us lean forward a little bit, but it's a great question, Dave.

Well, of course, there are probably three components to the answer.  One is a lot of the experts retire and go away, and you can bet your bippy that there are a lot of retired experts in counterinsurgency right now just chomping at the bit to give everybody advice.  You can check your e-mail today and find it.

But we have.  From time to time, we build huge amounts of knowledge about any warfare subject in this country lodged in particular people who go through particular conditions and they retire, so it just goes away.  It's not something you maintain on a level like a reservoir.

The second thing we do is I would argue we actually had a fair amount of counterinsurgency knowledge in the force that went into Iraq, or at least it was resident on active duty when it went in.  Certainly, the Special Operations community now is far better trained in counterinsurgency techniques and tactics than it's ever been probably since the end of the Vietnam War.

But my third answer is, if you look back at our experiences in warfare in general in this country for about the past century, as I did in preparation for this seminar, it seems to me that one of the things that this nation's armed forces don't do well is to recognize when the enemy has changed the tempo of war.  We just don't do it well.  The conditions change on the battlefield and it takes too long--I'm sorry.  Conditions change on the battlefield in such a way as to indicate that the enemy has adopted a different strategy and it just seems to take us too long to figure it out.  It's as if the chain of command just is way too slow.  The analysis is way too slow.

And the primary example, of course, is the one we're talking about today is Iraq.  We were far too slow realizing the kind of fight we were getting into and I just don't know why that is.  We have superb officers, superb noncommissioned officers, the news media telling us every day what's going on.  I don't know why we're that slow, but it's certainly something we have to look at structurally in our armed forces today.

MR.          :  This gives me a chance to give a glass-half-full answer because I would contend that because of the focus on low-intensity conflict in the 1980s and 1990s, that's one of the things that allowed the current relearning of counterinsurgency to probably be faster and more effective than any of these other cycles that we've undergone in the past because a lot of those people, you know, and kind of get at Bob personally here, but the answer is a lot of those people are as contractors today who are advising the military and other elements of the government.  So we do have that expertise around and I think that's made this transition more successful than in the past.

But one important thing that kind of derives from that question is that anyone who's spent a lot of time looking at counterinsurgency will tell you that the key to success is not the military component but it's the nonmilitary component.  The problem is that the other elements of the government, you know, the political and what not, didn't have an equivalent low-intensity conflict revolution in the 1980s and 1990s.

So that's kind of what we're missing today.  I don't think the problem--any problem that we face with the counterinsurgencies we're facing today, I actually don't think they're problems with the military but they're problems with the other elements of the government--

[Break between recorded tapes.]

MR.          :  --briefly, Bob's absolutely right.  There's been a long development, enhancement of the understanding of counterinsurgency and development of the counterinsurgency capability that is almost wholly resident inside Army Special Forces, inside Special Operations Command.

Special operations have come to be dominated not by the Unconventional Warfare School inside Special Forces, as you know, Tom, but by the direct action component, which is most visibly the Army Rangers and SFODD, the Delta Force.  This is very comprehensible to the conventional Army because it looks like something that they do, which is raiding.  Raiding is not counterinsurgency, but that's what most conventional force officers think Special Operations is.

MR.          :  Yes.  I just have to agree with--he made many of the points I wanted to make.  The expertise is not there, okay.  The expertise is in very small communities and these are not promoted past lieutenant colonel and colonel.  The big term now is to be a, quote, "operator," and I think that if you're a general, you're an operator.  If you're an officer, an operator, and that conveys the impression that you're actually on the factory floor running a big machine and the machine's fine and as long as you keep running the machine, everything will be fine.  That's a terrible attitude to have in a counterinsurgency because everything isn't fine and the machine isn't working and maybe you're not even supposed to be running that machine.  You might think about that.

The second thing is that they do not teach counterinsurgency in the schools.  They don't teach it at West Point.  They don't teach it at Leavenworth.  When they do teach counterinsurgency, it is on the extremely, on the tactical level and it's extremely superficial and it is these techniques will work and there's not an--I have to disagree with you.

I think the military has a fundamental problem right now in Iraq.  I don't think it's got it.  I just heard a four-star general tell me two months ago we finally think we're beginning to get a handle on who the insurgency is, what it's composed of.  To me, that's an--these guys are a problem.  They're not the solution.

And I would argue, if you take someone and run him through a career path in which he is rewarded exclusively for driving a ship, flying an airplane, or running a battalion and put him in a situation where none of those skills are really as important as his ability to get along with the local culture, learn the local religion, learn how to ask for information instead of shooting people, you're just, you know, you're asking for a disaster.

MR. DONNELLY:  You have to wait for the second question before you answer this first question the second time.

Let's try this gentleman in the second row over here.  Yes, you, sir.

MR. SCHWARTZ:  Peter Schwartz [ph.], Center for Naval Analysis and about 20 lives ago, as a junior officer, an operator in Vietnam as a counterinsurgency guy and also a counterinsurgency instructor.

Hey, I think many of the analogies we've discussed seem to be useful at the operational and the tactical level.  It seems to me in reflecting about the discussion that at the policy and strategic levels, the Iraq situation seems to me to be unique, and because of that, it might call for some quite different analogies.

We invaded a country.  We destroyed its armed forces.  We smashed its polity and its civil institutions and then we sought to create a new national polity and new civil institutions, and that's different from what we did in these other places, it seems to me.  So my question is going to be, does that difference matter?  Did it matter at the beginning and does it matter now?

The analogies that this calls forth are Germany, Japan, the Confederacy, and some interesting dogs that didn't bark.  We did not invade Spain in the Spanish-American War and didn't have to occupy it.  We didn't--we invaded Mexico and smashed it, but then all we did was rip off some provinces.  We didn't seek to control, occupy, and redirect the country.

So does any of that matter?  It seems to me initially one of the ways it matters is in the analogies about South Africa and the Israelis.  What they're trying to do is divide the guerillas, and as one of the ways that they're doing that is they're trying to divide the whole population.  And if they can get everybody fighting with each other, they win and that's reflected in what they do to the guerillas.

But that's different in Iraq because we're trying to build a national unified country at the same time we're trying to divide and destroy the guerillas.  So it seems tough, unique and different to me, because of that strategic difference, and I'm just wondering whether the panel would agree or disagree with that, and more importantly, what difference it makes now for the future, or did it only make a difference at the beginning.

MR. DONNELLY:  I assume everybody wants some of that, so we'll just go down the batting order.

MR. McALLISTER LINN:  I'd have to disagree with you.  At least in Filipino historiography, Aguinaldo was a legitimate government.  His army was a national army.  So that was a case of coming in, removing Spanish authority, which was--and the Spanish army, and then removing what they claim is a legitimate--I don't, but a legitimate nationalist government.

However, from the beginning, McKinley's orders to the Army were those of the benevolent assimilation in which the Army was seen as reconstructing Philippine society, and I think that's a fundamental difference with what is going on right now.

COL. KILLEBREW:  I'll just make a broad generalization that my fellow panelists can destroy if they want to, and it is that when you're facing a counterinsurgency war, if you get the strategy right, you can get the tactics wrong and eventually you'll get the tactics right.  If you get the strategy wrong and the tactics right at the start, you can refine the tactics forever but you still lose the war.  That's basically what we did in Vietnam.

In the present war, it seems to me that we started off with a misapplied strategic appreciation of what we were trying to do.  The jury is out now on whether or not we're going to be able to recover from that.  We'll find out at the end of this month.

The hardest thing in warfare is for an army or a nation to start off from the premise of a bad strategy, reconfigure that strategy in wartime, and come from behind to win.  That's the course we're on right now.  If we do it, we will have pulled off a major event in the military history of this country.

Now, that gets you down to defining victory in Iraq.  The victory in Iraq is a secular, reasonably democratic Iraqi government that can defend itself against its enemies when we leave, in my opinion, although I haven't really heard a definition like that from the administration.

Can we do that?  It depends on how they vote and it depends on whether or not they back up their vote then with their own effort as the Vietnamese had to, that within a year or two allows us to leave.  But we're coming from behind.

MR. SEPP:  I certainly agree that dealing with an insurgency inside a country with an established government provides great advantage in trying to beat down that insurgency.  The United States went through what was arguably a level one insurgency in the late '60s and early '70s with the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weatherman Faction of the SDS, other similar anti-government organizations beaten down by police and government, just not a difficulty.

This makes El Salvador all the more worth the--the Iraq situation makes El Salvador worth looking at to draw some examples from because that government, while it was called the government of El Salvador throughout, in fact, it has to transition from, in the late-'70s, a medieval feudal government to a functioning and unified democracy and it manages that.  The military side is only one part of it, and exactly as Steve was saying.  The other part of it is a tremendous State Department effort, United Nations effort, and NGO and PVOs that were very, very much engaged in shaping the new government.

MR. METZ:  Two quick points.  When I try to categorize insurgencies, I divide them in the very broadest sense at the strategic level, kind of two ways, between what I call liberation insurgencies that are essentially about expelling the outsiders, you know, I think about South Africa and Israel is perceived as that among a lot of the insurgent supporters, and today, of course, Iraq is perceived as that.  The other kind is what I call a national insurgency, and I think El Salvador would be an example of that, where the struggle is about which of two internal groups gets to run the place in the future.

What I was suggesting here is that there are very few historical examples of successful ways, successful non-brutal ways of confronting liberation insurgencies.  There are ways, as in El Salvador, of confronting a national insurgency.  You simply show that the regime offers a better long-term deal than the insurgents.

So I think what we're trying to do in Iraq today, at least to the extent I understand American strategy, is to shift it from being a liberation struggle to a national struggle through the elections and things like that.  If that works, I think we have a lot greater chance of long-term success through sustained support than otherwise.

Second point, to kick it up to an even higher level of strategy than what you're talking about here, remember that the counterinsurgencies we're involved in today are under the rubric of the global war on terrorism, and what I was trying to suggest is I think that creates some problems because it takes a lot of methods off of the table, because if Iraq is about confronting terrorists, that means you can't go to the insurgents and say, hey, we're willing to negotiate a settlement with you, you know, we're willing to recognize some of your leaders, because they're terrorists.  You can't do that.

So what I'm suggesting here is that under the rubric of the global war on terrorism, it's very, very difficult to successfully prosecute a national-level counterinsurgency because it limits your options so much.  I mean, if you're fighting terrorists, really, all you can do is to kill the terrorists but then to try to change the root causes so that future people don't become terrorists.  That's a fairly limited range of options and that's what you have to do when the enemy is, in fact, terrorists.  But in a counterinsurgency, you have a somewhat broader array of options.

MR. DONNELLY:  Sean?  We have a little bit--we're going to extend the deadline a little bit.  I would encourage questioners to be brief, and if you have somebody in particular you'd like to direct your question to, please do that.

MR. NAYLOR:  I'm Sean Naylor [ph.] from Army Times.  A brief question for all four panelists plus Tom if you want to weigh in.  Is the United States winning or losing in Iraq?

MR.          :  I guess that's going to be depending on how you're going to define victory, which is--

MR. NAYLOR:  You define it.

MR.          :  Okay.  My take on that is the administration is going to declare victory and get out, and that's victory.  That's what they're going to do.

MR.          :  I'll tell you after the 30th of January.

MR.          :  I'm aware from my last tour of duty on General George Casey's strategy division that they are working very, very hard to get it right.  I am concerned at this point it may be too late.

MR.          :  I guess I in a way get to be a glass half full again.  When I'm asked that question, I usually say it's the first quarter of a four-quarter game and we're probably behind now, but that's no reason to kind of throw up the white flag.  It's kind of like we're a football flag that's down 14 to nothing in the first quarter.  We've got a way to go.  We still need some additional effort.  But if this is a ten- to 15-year struggle and we're 18 months into it, it's really too early to draw any conclusive conclusions at this point.

MR. DONNELLY:  Bob, you can reclaim a brief amount of your--

COL. KILLEBREW:  Well, there's just one thing.  Not to address the subject directly, but we have to remember that winning or losing in this thing also involves the Iraqi people and the whole essence of the counterinsurgency question we're asking ourselves involves whether or not the Iraqi people are going to be able to pull this thing out and establish the government that will eventually be beneficial to us.  That's why I think we may not like it, but after all of our stupendous efforts in Iraq and all the loss of life and the expense of U.S. taxpayer money over there, the outcome depends on the election that the Iraqis themselves hold and what they decide to do about their country, and that's counterinsurgency.

MR. DONNELLY:  Well, I will just briefly say that all four of the panelists have violated their own rules of analyses in applying them to Iraq.  Everybody's got too short a time horizon.  Yes, it's the first quarter, but I think we're ahead by a lot.  So the question is, can we close it out?  We're ahead by a lot in that a majority of the population and certainly an overwhelming majority of the Shiia and Kurdish population are on our side.  I'm not going to define that too precisely.

Some of the hiccups, some of the, to use Steve's language, we have, I think, successfully converted Muqtada al Sadr from an ex-terrorist to a politician.  He's still not a very pleasant fellow, but his means of functioning in Iraq are substantially different because his military force has been at least initially defeated.

So I would just think we're doing pretty well.  The glass is pretty full and we're still pouring in a lot of water and I think I won't push that analogy any farther than that.

Let's try the young woman in the middle there.

MS. GUYER:  Thank you, Tom.  I'm Georgianne Guyer [ph.], Universal Press Syndicate.

A provocative question, perhaps, but I've enjoyed this very much and I've covered insurgencies myself for many years.  Isn't Iraq totally differ