CORDS / Phoenix: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Vietnam for the Future

[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

[jmm99]

I wouldn't disagree with you that US authors classify the Viet Cong as an "insurgency". That view is not new (soup was eaten off a knife long before Nagl) - because it fit the US political posture. That was that SVN was an independent nation state with legitimate governace over all of the population in SVN. Thus, any citizen of SVN who took up arms against the RVN was an "insurgent".

E.g., a brief Wilfian definition of insurgency (here):

They become an insurgency when they try to replace the existing government as that which exercises authority over them, and use violent means to secure that policy.

There were at least two problems with the US-GVN approach. One (more minor) is that it gave credence to the NLF (National Liberation Front) as as a South Vietnamese group, independent of the DRV government and the Lao Dong (CP of Vietnam). We know that was nonsense, but it led to bi-furcated thinking - an "insurgency" threat in the South and a conventional threat from the North.

The second was the VietComs did not look at the war in that manner. In their view, the "existing government" in the South (RVN) was not "that which exercised authority over them". "Them" being the Viet Cong. Their government was the government of Hanoi, ruling over a unified Vietnam (albeit half-occupied by the US and its SV puppets). In essence, their argument was the same as that of the French Resistence - their government was the Free French in exile; the Vichy government being a puppet of the Germans.

What followed from these two very different positions was even more critical. The VietCom effort (a combined PAVN and NLF effort, which was FM 31-21 in effect) had Unity of Command - Hanoi's control over the NLF was exercised through COSVN. Our (US and RVN) efforts (counterinsurgency vs NLF; conventional vs PAVN/NVA; and bombing of NV) had no unity - in effect, three separate wars (further divided by your annual iterations - another of our defaults).

Fortunately for us, the other events in SE Asia of the 60s and 70s turned out well for us (US) - so, we clearly won in SE Asia as a whole region. But, SVN was lost (I don't concede that was due to US failures alone - see this post) to what I perceive as being a superior concept of that armed conflict by the VietComs on a strategic level.

Dwell on my iconoclastic suggestions for a bit. E.g., that we should have treated the NLF and Viet Cong as an unconventional force (it using concepts similar to FM 31-21), as opposed to treating it as an "insurgency".

Best regards

Mike

[John T. Fishel]

to the extent that you argue for a totally unified effort by the DRV that included the NLF and VC as controlled agents. One problem that the Lao Dong party had was that its southern (and to a lesser degree central) VN affiliates - essentially the NLF - was too independent. This also held for the VC. Tet 68 had the positive effect for the DRV (and PAVN) of getting rid of a troublesome ally/agent that could not be completely trusted. The other part of the story is that when the PAVN seized all of SVN in 1975 one of the first acts of the new govt was to purge the NLF. At the same time, we should not make too much of the divisions w/in the VietComs...

Ah, well, time for a beer...

Cheers

JohnT

[jmm99]

no real disagreement on several of your points.

[1] One problem that the Lao Dong party had was that its southern (and to a lesser degree central) VN affiliates - essentially the NLF - was too independent. This also held for the VC. [2] Tet 68 had the positive effect for the DRV (and PAVN) of getting rid of a troublesome ally/agent that could not be completely trusted. [3] The other part of the story is that when the PAVN seized all of SVN in 1975 one of the first acts of the new govt was to purge the NLF.

1. Agreed - the NLF included many Vietnamese nationalists (e.g., Al Santoli, To Bear Any Burden, 1985, had some of them tell their stories).

2. Agreed - Tet 68 saved the LD hit squads a lot of future work.

3. Agreed - The Victory Parade story (Santoli, pp.18-19) of Truong Nhu Tang (Minister of Justice, NLF 1960-1976) proves your point. He noticed no PRG or NLF flags or uniforms (2 weeks after Saigon's fall). In reply to Truong's question, GEN Van Tien Dung (CO of the NVA) replied coldly that "the armed forces are now unified". The parade was followed by people disappearing or forced into "re-education".

Note that I said that Hanoi had Unity of Command over its conventional and unconventional forces. I did not say that the members of those forces were monoliths and unified on every point, especially political. As the Zhivago commisar said: "As the military struggle winds down, the political struggle intensifies."

I also am not claiming some secret recipe which would have saved South Vietnam, had we looked at the conflict as involving a combined conventional and unconventional effort by Hanoi.

Bob Jones has at times mentioned counter-unconventional warfare (or words to that effect). I don't know whether he (and the other SF folks here) see a substantial difference between counter-unconventional warfare and counter-insurgency.

I do know that unconventional warfare has been very successful for the guerrillas (Spain 1808, Russia 1812, Russia & Yugoslavia in WWII; but, I suppose, those can be explained because of the successes of their allied conventional forces - as also Vietnam). There must be examples of successful counter-unconventional warfare - but not in my brain-dead state tonite.

Any input on counter-unconventional warfare is welcome - I'm already out on a limb.

Cheers with your beers - have a virtual one on me.

Mike

Addendum: One comment by COL Jones is here:

One mission set that does not exist that I believe is helpful is that of "counter unconventional warfare." This would be the entire family of engagement that one would employ to stop an outside entitiy from waging UW in a given state/populace. It would include the full DIME, CT, etc. I beleive this is more helpful than just labeling a state as "rogue" or an organization as "terrorist" At the end of the day do we need to "defeat" AQ, or do we simply need to neutralize them? In fact there are many that think that AQ is fading due to its overreliance on violent ways, and failure to adapt more political wings like the IRA and Hezbollah. If this is true, I think instead of cheering the demise, we need to be very concerned about what replaces them. The conditions that gave rise to AQ still exist in spades. Here I agree with Gentile, there is no victory. By changing our campaign to a more holistic counterUW campaign aimed at neutralizing AQ by rendering them irrelevant to the populaces they seek to influence we have a better chance of not giving rise to a second, more sophisticated generation of non-state actor that comes in behind them to continue the mission. Counter UW works for states also. Clearly we do not want to "defeat" Iran to prevent them from waging UW in Iraq, or Lebannon, but we do need to devise a sophisticated, holistic scheme of engagement to counter this UW effort and it destabilizing effects that are counter to our national interests.

He also has mentioned "counter-unconventional warfare" in connection with counter-irregular warfare, here.

SOF could profit from developing "Counter unconventional warfare" as a tool in our kitbag