Vietnam collection (lessons plus)

[SWJED]

March - April issue of Military Review - CORDS / Phoenix: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future by Mr. Dale Andrade and Lieutenant Colonel James Willbanks.

As the United States ends its third year of war in Iraq, the military continues to search for ways to deal with an insurgency that shows no sign of waning. the specter of Vietnam looms large, and the media has been filled with comparisons between the current situation and the “quagmire” of the Vietnam War. Differences between the two conflicts are legion, but observers can learn lessons from the Vietnam experience—if they are judicious in their search. For better or worse, Vietnam is the most prominent historical example of American counterinsurgency (COIN) - and the longest - so it would be a mistake to reject it because of its admittedly complex and controversial nature. An examination of the paci*fication effort in Vietnam and the evolution of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program provides useful insights into the imperatives of a viable COIN program...

[SWJED]

March - April Military Review - Revisiting CORDS: The Need for Unity of Effort to Secure Victory by Major Ross Coffey, US Army.

According to the National Strategy, weekly strat*egy sessions at the highest levels of the U.S. Government ensure that Iraq remains a top priority. At the operational level, the “team in Baghdad—led by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey—works to implement policy on the ground and lay the foundation for long-term success.” Each of the eight pillars have corresponding interagency working groups to coordinate policy, review and assess progress, develop new proposals, and oversee the implementation of existing policies. The multitracked approach (political, security, and economic) to counterinsurgency in Iraq has historical parallels with the Civil operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program of the Vietnam War era. established in 1967, CORDS partnered civilian and military entities engaged in pacification of Vietnamese rural areas. The program enhanced rural security and local political and economic development and helped defeat the Viet Cong (VC) insurgency. Significantly, CORDS unified the efforts of the pacification entities by establishing unity of command throughout the combined civil-military organization. Lack of unity of effort is perhaps the most signifi*cant impediment to operational-level interagency action today. The victorious conditions the National Strategy describes might be unachievable if the interagency entities present in Iraq do not achieve unity of effort. To help achieve unity of effort, Multi-Force–Iraq (MNF-I) and the nation should consider adopting a CORDS-like approach to ensure integrated action and victory...

[Jedburgh]

JFQ, 4th Qtr 07: The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Warfare

In the mid-1990s, the Phoenix program was considered an artifact of historical interest but with little relevance to the contemporary world. I therefore analyzed the program primarily from a historian’s perspective in the first edition of Phoenix and the Birds of Prey, making few references to the present or future. Readers interested in future applicability were left to draw their own conclusions from the history. A decade later, Iraq and Afghanistan have brought the study of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism back into fashion. For this reason, the new edition contains this additional chapter summarizing the principal lessons.....

[Jedburgh]

RAND, 14 Jul 09: The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency

One of the principal requirements of counterinsurgency is the ability to disrupt or destroy not just the insurgency’s military capabilities but also the infrastructure that supports the insurgent forces. This infrastructure provides, among other things, the critical intelligence, recruiting, and logistics functions that enable insurgents to contend with counterinsurgent forces that are often much more capable in a purely military sense. During the Vietnam War, one of the main efforts to attack the insurgent infrastructure was known as the Phoenix Program. Phoenix has subsequently become highly controversial, and its lessons for contemporary counterinsurgency can be overdrawn. However, a careful assessment of Phoenix does provide some suggestions for improving current efforts against insurgent infrastructure.

[davidbfpo]

Just in case the subject re-appears: an article on SWJ Blog: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=7927 and from a Canadian journal 'The Theoretical Aspect of Targeted Killings: The Phoenix Program as a Case Study': http://digitization.ucalgary.ca/jmss...viewFile/57/67

davidbfpo

[jmm99]

The articles linked above are all worthwhile and deserve DLing for future reference. However, they look at CORDS-Phoenix from a non-Vietnamese viewpoint. For example, the 2009 Canadian article (cited by David) does not cite Tran's "Pacification".

The story of the GVN's pacification programs (including CORDS-Phoenix) was told by Tran Dinh Tho, Pacification (1977; one of the Indochina Monographs - 7mb DL), who was a key player in the programs. All being said, "pacification" had to be laregly a South Vietnamese effort - the problem was their "insurgency" or "guerrilla war"; not ours. Tran tells the story of that effort - the good, the bad and the ugly.

One can classify the "Viet Cong" activities in the South in more than one way, legally and militarily. The articles linked above call it an "insurgency" - as do many books written on Vietnam (those that elect not to treat it as a "conventional" war). The Vietnamese Communists looked at it differently.

Their view was that the successful August 1945 Insurrection (ending their Revolutionary War) led to a unified Vietnam (as a nation-state), with Ho's government its recognized government (agreements with the French, 1945-1946). The French then reneged and attacked the Viet Minh (their view). The French and their Vietnamese puppets then occupied most of the country.

Thus, the following First Indochina War was in Viet Minh terms a Resistence War (with their guerrilla forces, North and South, being akin to the French Resistence of WWII). DPB and the Geneva Accords gave validity to North Vietnam, but a unified Vietnam (not Two Vietnams) was the North's goal. The formation of the RVN under Diem, and growing US involvement, was simply regarded as the same thing as the French occupation under its puppets.

The result by the early 1960s was a mixture of conventional and unconventional warfare (as defined in FM 31-21 from that time). Thus, from the first 2006 article linked above:

In Vietnam, the U.S. military faced arguably the most complex, effective, lethal insurgency in history. The enemy was no rag-tag band lurking in the jungle, but rather a combination of guerrillas, political cadre, and modern main-force units capable of standing toe to toe with the U.S. military. Any one of these would have been significant, but in combination they presented a formidable threat.

When U.S. ground forces intervened in South Vietnam in 1965, estimates of enemy guerrilla and Communist Party front strength stood at more than 300,000. In addition, Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese main forces numbered almost 230,000—and that number grew to 685,000 by the time of the Communist victory in 1975. These main forces were organized into regiments and divisions, and between 1965 and 1968 the enemy emphasized main-force war rather than insurgency.[1] During the war the Communists launched three conventional offensives: the 1968 Tet Offensive, the 1972 Easter Offensive, and the final offensive in 1975. All were major campaigns by any standard. Clearly, the insurgency and the enemy main forces had to be dealt with simultaneously.

1. Thomas C. Thayer, How to Analyze a War Without Fronts: Vietnam, 1965-72 (Washington, DC: Defense Research Projects Agency, 1975), 788-89.

The end result was a juncture of conventional and unconventional forces (made up of guerrilla and auxilliary forces and underground cadres) - as called for by our own doctrine in FM 31-21. Thus, the Vietnam War did not involve an insurgency (as opposed to the situations in Malaya and the Philippines, which were true insurgencies). Rather, Vietnam was more akin to Indonesia - also where a successful Revolutionary War ended in 1945, followed by a foreign occupation and Resistence War. Fortunately for us (the US), the Indonesia Revolution was largely bourgeois nationalistic (albeit anti-Western). That feature led to the eradication of Indonesian Communism in 1965-1966; and to formation of ASEAN, which changed the SE Asian picture by 1968.

I'll take a better look at the Canadian article re: its Targeted Killings thesis - which issue, I believe, is covered in other threads.

[John T. Fishel]

said... but it was also an insurgency. The winners have their myth - based on their perception of truth - but it remains the victors myth. We have our own myths... As some of us quipped at the time, the VN war was not one war 12 years long but rather 12 wars, each one year long (for the US, that is). Actually, there is another set of dimensions that need to be considered. It was a different war in each of the 6 military regions, in the air, and at sea. At some point, however, adding dimensions simply become counterproductive. In the end, I would argue that what we look at should depend on the question we are asking, remembering the complexity all the while.

Cheers

JohnT