Foreign Internal Defense (Indigenous Forces)

[White Rabbit]

Mike, David, thank you for your inputs--very interesting although they go beyond the answer I am looking for.

To be honest my question is more superficial, i.e. if in the U.S. and the U.S. military, there has been, or is, a reluctance to use FID as it has been portrayed as leading to rather messy outcomes, including death squads in the case of El-Salvador.

P.S. Because of the sensitive nature of the subject, I just want to emphasis the fact that I am not merely looking to point fingers at someone or something just for the sake of it. I am genuinely wondering if there have been, or is, some reluctance regarding the "re-birth" of FID alongside COIN doctrine, e.g. due to the aforementioned death squads in the case of El-Salvador.

[ganulv]

I can’t tell you the first thing about how FID is currently looked upon within the U.S. Military or by civilian policymakers within the Federal Government, but at the risk of going off-topic I do want to comment on the below.

To be honest my question is more superficial, i.e. if in the U.S. and the U.S. military, there has been, or is, a reluctance to use FID as it has been portrayed as leading to rather messy outcomes, including death squads in the case of El-Salvador.

From what I know of Salvadoran history events such as the Mozote massacre look like patterned behavior the antecedents of which precede the existence of the Special Forces or the CIA. As someone who is particular with semantics, I myself consider statements to the effect that FID lead to such events during the Salvadoran Civil War to be poorly informed. I don’t feel like that lets U.S. policymakers off the hook in regards to aid military or otherwise to the Salvadoran Government during the conflict, though. They either did not know who they were getting into bed with (i.e., were reckless), did not care who they were getting into bed with (i.e., were promiscuous), or knew who they were getting into bed with and thought they were going to be able to make an honest woman out of her (i.e., were some mix of naïve and supercilious).

[White Rabbit]

As someone who is particular with semantics, I myself consider statements to the effect that FID lead to such events during the Salvadoran Civil War to be poorly informed.

I take the criticism.

This was presented to me by a (B.A.) university teacher I knew as biased. Further light Internet research led me to two WikiLeaks pieces which are available over here and here (the manual is a great read).

I nonetheless wanted to get an idea of how FIDs are perceived within the U.S. and U.S. military and Small Wars Journal seemed the best place to get some general information, as your post proved it.

Thank you for the links by the way...

[ganulv]

I take the criticism.

No need to. It wasn’t a criticism of anything I necessarily took to be your own personal opinion. I was weighing in on the type of portrayal you mention.

Thank you for the links by the way...

To you, as well. Happily I am not dreaming of employment with the State Department so I am free to peruse.

[Dayuhan]

In the 70s and 80s there was certainly a broad perception that US FID and military training condoned human rights abuses or didn't do enough to stop them. There may be some substance to that. In the post-Vietnam environment a lot of Americans still felt that we lost because we had to fight with one hand tied behind our backs, and respect for human rights was still widely (and bizarrely) seen as a disadvantage in the war against communism.

Still I think that the trend is generally overstated. The people we were working with needed no instruction or assistance to abuse their people; they'd been doing it for years on their own... and it's not likely that anything the US would say or do was going to stop them.

Today of course this is largely ancient history, except to the Chomsky-wing left and others like them. In the Philippines the US has attained a fair degree of popularity in areas where we're doing field FID, and that's less because of development work than because of a perception that the Philippine military behave better when Americans are around. Can't speak from direct experience of other areas currently, but I'd be curious to hear of any recent claims that US FID is aiding and abetting abuse. No real point in warming over the old stuff yet again.

[Bill Moore]

Seems like we may be confusing CT, COIN and FID. Foreign internal defense (FID) is the participation by civilian and military agencies of a government in any of the action programs taken by another government or other designated organization, to free and protect its society from subversion, lawlessness, insurgency, terrorism, and other threats to their security. The focus of US FID efforts is to support the host nation’s (HN’s) internal defense and development (IDAD), which can be described as the full range of measures taken by a nation to promote its growth and protect itself from the security threats described above.

I agree that the French and Brits both influenced our COIN doctrine in the 70s and 80s, even if they didn't get credit for the influence. And yes, rougher methods were generally more accepted during the Cold War as the cost of doing business. Perhaps not a stated policy, but in practice we did follow the he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard rule. Our objective was to contain communism, and the ends were generally more important than the means. However, as Dayuhan pointed out no one needed to teach these guys how to torture or abuse anyone, they were abusing their people and prisoners long before they met any American advisors.

Did the U.S. teach these methods? I can only speak from my experience in the 80s (we cleaned up our act in the 90s). The short answer is no, but I accept there "may" have even some U.S. persons involved who promoted these methods based on their personal views, but I'm not aware of doctrine that promoted these abuses. I'm referring to the military only, the three letter agency folks can speak for themselves. I recall seeing a few abuses over the years in more than one developing nation, and during that time frame we had no mandate to intervene like we do now. None the less, I did intervene in two separate incidents in two separate countries to stop (at least for the moment) foreign troops from abusing their own people (such as beating up a local civilian to get information, when he wasn't even a suspect, it was just normal practice). We would attempt to mentor them later on why that behavior was counterproductive, but we had no mandate to stop it or disengage with them if they did, like we do now. My general impression was no one in the USG was supportive of this, and worked patiently to change this behavior. What the CIA may have done the 70s in Latin America is another story, but like most of us on SWJ, we only know what we read, and suspect a great deal of that is inaccurate.

The bottom line is these were cultural norms, and since in FID we were advising and assisting we didn't make the rules, but mentored and in some cases instructed. We were teaching the importance of a proper relationship with the populace long before population centric COIN became vogue in 2006 or so. The focus wasn't the population, but defeating the insurgency, but realizing you couldn't do that effectively if you alienated the population.

All that said I'm not opposed to a tough interrogation run by a true professional. Intelligence is critical, and the best intelligence for these types of conflicts is human intelligence, especially in those days. A tough interrogation conducted by a professional is not torture.

Finally, the brutal tactics employed by the French worked, so it would be naive to dismiss them as ineffective, but that isn't point, it simply isn't the way we fight based on our national morals, which are for the most part codified into law.

[White Rabbit]

Dayuhan, Bill, thank you for sharing your experiences.

Without going too much into the philosophical, they confirm one of the rare facts of life as far as I am concerned: nothing is black and white, everything is grey.

[ganulv]

Finally, the brutal tactics employed by the French worked, so it would be naive to dismiss them as ineffective, but that isn't point, it simply isn't the way we fight based on our national morals, which are for the most part codified into law.

If the reference is to Algeria, I have never understood the reasoning behind the assertion that what the French did there was effective. I know that had politics not taken the turn they did that the FLN would likely have been soon reduced to a non-factor, but the conflict in Algeria helped generate the political context that brought de Gaulle to power.

[ganulv]

Seems like we may be confusing CT, COIN and FID.

As someone with no background of military service my intuition regarding the three would be something along the lines of the following. During my Reagan Era childhood, Delta/1st SFOD-D/CAG was described as a/the counter-terrorism unit, so in my head I associate hostage rescue, snatch and grab, and assassination with CT. Having first learned of the concept of counterinsurgency as a 20–year–old living in Guatemala in the early ‘90s my reflexive thought when I read or hear discussion of COIN is in line with W. George Lovell’s statement that “[k]illing Maya Indians and laying their communities to waste does not solve the problem of reluctant native labor. But it has served effectively to traumatize survivors into submission.” I sort of take the adoption of the abbreviation to be a rebranding while having a vague notion that what used to be a bludgeon is now more like a stick and that some substantial carrots have been added into the mix. As for FID, I happen to have known a fellow who was with the Special Forces in Vietnam (he walked away from a football scholarship at Marshall en route—some guys have all the luck! ) so when I see reference to that term I think of some version of my friend out in the bush/hills/jungle running drills with some version of the Montagnards. So I did a quick search for the doctrinal definitions to see if I was anywhere in the neighborhood and I turned up the following:

• CT Operations that include the offensive measures taken to prevent, deter, preempt, and respond to terrorism. (JP 1–02)
• COIN Counterinsurgency is military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency. (JP 1–02)
• FID FID programs encompass the total political, economic, informational, and military support provided to another nation to assist its fight against subversion and insurgency. (JP 3–07)

Am I accurate here? I kind of hope I am not, because given the amount of overlap amongst them it is almost as if the definitions were created to engender confusion…