Foreign Internal Defense (Indigenous Forces)

[White Rabbit]

Statement:

In 1959, a French military mission is created in Buenos Aires where French officers--all veterans from Algeria--translate Roger Trinquier, hold classes and publish articles in military revues.

In the mid-1960s, they move on to the School of the Americas where they teach American instructors and, eventually, directly teach special forces at Fort Bragg.

Special forces then put to practice what they have learned in Foreign Internal Defense programmes, particularly in Latin America.

Given the fact that Trinquier sanctions torture in Modern Warfare (1), and in the light of atrocities perpetrated in Latin America during the same period as Foreign Internal Defense programmes where in place (e.g. in El-Salvador), my question is the following: despite that FIDs programmes evolved in the right direction, to what extend is this history known and, accordingly, to what extend are FIDs controversial in the U.S.?

.

(1)

No lawyer is present for such an interrogation. If the prisoner gives the information requested, the examination is quickly terminated; if not, specialists must force his secret from him. Then, as a soldier, he must face the suffering, and perhaps the death, he has heretofore managed to avoid

Source: R. Trinquier, Modern Warfare (Praeger Security International, 2006), p. 19. Nota bene, it is even more explicit in the original, French, version.

[MikeF]

Welcome to the Small Wars world. As you read the primary sources, you'll see the first hand accounts of why these types of wars are messy, and many come to the conclusion that we should limit our involvement in others affairs unless absolutely necessary.

As for FID, you'll have to be more specific and ask about a certain country. Each mission can test the moral fiber of the service member. Yesterday, over at Tom Rick's blog, "Leroy the Masochist" provided a very good description of how he dealt with his moral dilemmas as a military advisor to the Iraqi Army,

Usually the right thing to do is obvious. Other times... during my MTT deployment one of the hardest things we had to do as a team was sit down and get consensus about how much corruption we would tolerate in the Iraqi officers we advised. If we, per "doing the right thing all the time" as preached by [take your pick: Army, USMC, Service Academy, etc] doctrine, had decided to tolerate zero corruption, we would have had to push for the firing of two-thirds of the Iraqi officers in our battalion; the remaining one-third, we didn't have solid evidence on.

The integrity vs. loyalty dynamic is in my opinion the hardest one for leaders to negotiate at the small-unit level. The terrible choice between either not ratting out your buddies (loyalty) or standing up for what is right (integrity/ethics) has always been, and will always be, one of the demons haunting the profession of arms.

The problem is, where do you draw the line. Doing things by the book would have destroyed our ability to advise the Iraqis effectively, but "going native" and completely abrogating any semblance of professional ethics wasn't a choice either, obviously. We did end up purging the battalion of a couple of guys who were particularly egregious; this had the ancillary effect of getting the less-corrupt guys to tone it down a bit.

Me, personally, I had to place an Iraqi company commander in jail for torturing and murdering prisoners, and I had to really work hard to mentor another company to stop torturing. It was a very difficult environment to work in. At the time, tensions were very high, and a lot of violence was going on.

[davidbfpo]

White Rabbit,

I think I see what you are looking for - how does the inter-nation transfer of COIN doctrine and practice work, using the application of whether torture became part of FID.

It might help to look at the field of intelligence ethics, a good starting point is here:http://intelligence-ethics.org/confe...rence_2011.pdf

Which touches upon the separate Anglo-French experience and indicates SME work to check for.

[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.