The Illusion of Progress: CORDS and the Crisis of Modernization in South Vietnam 1965-1968



Definitely worth reading, and ensure you read the footnotes. This should quiet the constant barrage of empty rhetoric from many who believe they are on the cutting edge of COIN because they're pushng a development agenda to indirectly defeat the adversary. This approach to some degree was pushed in the Philippines at the beginning of the last century, but it became the rage during the Cold War, and it didn't work then either.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...KUIX3EELpD3Mjg

A few excerpts to wet the appetite.

Modernization theory gained policy and academic prominence
during the 1950s. Under the fog of fear and suspicion that defined the Cold War, it gave policymakers a dynamic theory of accelerated growth, based upon a hierarchy of measurable stages they could apply without conflict or contradiction across a broad spectrum of nations, races, and cultures.
Modernization theory also held that rational societies were intrinsically good, fundamentally alike, and perpetually dynamic. The theory’s assumptions spawned a gospel of development, with all the trappings of religious dogma. Moral certitude, however, concealed a dark side of the theory that made development such an abstraction that it excused human suffering as the unavoidable but acceptable price of growth
.

examining the 1964 Special Operations Research Office (SORO), Project Camelot. The Army and Department of Defense created this program with a mandate to “determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems model that would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world.
even Huntington extolled war as an appropriate precondition for modernization. The erosion of authority, social disintegration, human displacement, and infrastructural upheaval that accompanied war provided a clean slate for seeding development.
Military modernization’s danger, however, rested on its propensity to incubate despotism and to sanction what Nils Gilman has called the “indefinite deferral of democracy in the name of stability.
Komer remarked that he had to remind Johnson to focus on the realities of the conflict, at one point jesting, “Boss, why don’t we win the war first. Then we’ll turn on the lights.” In 1966, when CORDS was in its gestational stage, rural electrification was a ridiculous ambition, and Komer knew it. Nevertheless, it succeeded at framing Johnson’s vision for the region as he refocused on the Other War.
The CIA exacerbated Komer’s problems with a report that found increased communist insurgency against pacification in the backcountry