Historical Prospective of Counterinsurgency
The history of United States counterinsurgency is a good example of the United States’ evolution to obtain and maintain world domination. The practice of military intervention, the arrogation of national security, and anti-Communist ideology were basic components of policy during the Truman and Eisenhower years, it was not until Kennedy took office that the shift to counterinsurgency occurred. In the early years of the Kennedy Administration United States foreign policy shifted to a political and military strategy of counterinsurgency against wars of national independence in Third World countries. This military and political shift in foreign policy resulted in an increase of military defense contracts and the large-scale development of new and advanced weapons; this was the obvious result of the United States’ increasing involvement in the undeclared war in Southeast Asia. These new weapons being developed for counterinsurgency were crucial to the achievement of Kennedy’s new military strategy.
Kennedy inherited a military capability that consisted of nuclear arms and air command bombers. This military buildup had been under a 1945 policy called the “Massive Retaliation” doctrine, which was part of the Eisenhower administrations New Look program. The Massive Retaliation doctrine was based on the simple idea that the very threat of nuclear reprisal was enough to deter Russia from attacking the United States or any other NATO nations (Rostow 1960:305). Kennedy’s advisors felt that this military planning was inadequate for meeting challenges to the “national interest” of the United States. These “challenges” included areas of the world such as Cuba, the Congo, and Southeast Asia, all of which represented successful Communist administrations (Collier 1984: 265). These successes were viewed as a direct threat to the maintenance of United States hegemony in the formerly colonial areas of Latin America. To a large extent, the nuclear deterrent strategy of massive retaliation was never intended to be a strategy to extend United States dominance but rather a policy of communist deterrence.
Maxwell D. Taylor, former Army Chief of Staff from 1955-1959, described the United States’ deterrent policy as “ . . . the use or the threatened use of atomic weapons of mass destruction (which) would be sufficient to assure the security of the United States” (Taylor: 4). After dropping the bomb on the Japanese at the end of World War II, the United States showed the world its absolute power and its ability to police the world with the premonition of its use. However, Taylor did not feel this policy went far enough and referred to it as the “Great Fallacy” in his book, The Uncertain Trumpet. Moreover, he suggested the need for the United States to transform from a deterrent approach to that of a counterinsurgency strategy:
Initially, the concept had been that ground forces in Europe and the Far East were the shield behind which the U.S. could deliver the devastating blows of its atomic sword. Now the role was being reversed. The atomic retaliatory forces had become the shield of protection warding off the threat of hostile atomic attack, while forces of limited war provided the flexible sword for parry, riposte, and attack (Taylor: 64).
The Kennedy administration’s shift in foreign policy came shortly after the January 6, 1961 speech of Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the Moscow Conference of Communist Parties in which he explained the Communist agenda. Former Assistant Chief in the United States Department of State W.W. Rostow dissected Khrushchev’s speech to the administrations liking:
. . . the Communist fully support what (Khrushchev) called wars of national liberation and would march in the front rank with the peoples waging such struggles. The military arm of Mr. Khrushchev’ January 1961 doctrine is clearly, guerrilla warfare” (Rostow 1964:112).
This seemed to be the theme of most inside chroniclers of the Kennedy administration and each looked to Khrushchev’s speech as an announcement of a new “red menace.” The speech may have represented Kennedy’s public excuse and justification, but it was hardly the cause for the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy. Nevertheless, the counterinsurgency strategy was aimed at the Third World revolutions, which could not be created or controlled by the Soviet Union. Former Kennedy Administration Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Roger Hilsman, paraphrases the theoretician and Communist revolutionary Mao Tsetung in his book, To Move A Nation:
Mao and his closest disciples, such as Lin Piao, consistently argued then and later that “revolutionary wars” cannot be either initiated from outside or sustained by outside help, but that virtually the entire burden must be carried by the people of the country fighting for its “national liberation” (Hilsman: 414).
Hilsman did admit, “ experience, certainly, has shown that a revolutionary group can come at least close to doing the job by itself” (Hilsman: 414). Moreover, limited or conventional war depends on an aggressive strategy and not a response to attack. A “limited” war would be one in which it is fought in an underdeveloped country and atomic weapons are used as needed. Rostow defines ‘limited’ war as, “ a war limited consciously in three dimensions- terrain, weapons, and objectives” (Rostow 1960: 319). A “conventional” or “general” war is when the United States and Russia are directly involved and atomic weapons are instantly used. The Soviet Union did have the arsenal capacity to strike the continental United States; the Vietnamese liberation fighters did not. And the strategy of “limited” war was developed and long argued by the critics of the “massive retaliation” doctrine far before Khrushchev made his speech.
Toward the late 1950’s many military theorists and generals began rejecting “the thesis of the Eisenhower-Dulles Administration that the United States would spend itself into bankruptcy if it prepared to fight aggression locally at places and with weapons of the enemy’s own choosing” (Osgood: 44). They began calling for a military build-up for “limited” war through books such as, Taylor’s The Uncertain Trumpet, articles published in magazines such as, Ordanance and Aviation Week, network news programs and speaking engagements as shown in the documentary film Hearts and Minds (Davis 1974) to convince the United States public that this build-up was critically necessary to guarantee a United States victory in any type of armed confrontation.
Leading spokesman of this military build-up movement was General Taylor, he directly attacked the Massive Retaliation doctrine by declaring it “has reached a dead end” and only left the United States with two military options, “the initiation of general nuclear war or compromise and retreat” (Taylor: 5). Taylor had felt that the Massive Retaliation doctrine might prevent World War III however, “it has not maintained the Little Peace; that is, Peace from disturbances which are little only in comparison with the disaster of general war” (Taylor: 6). Taylor looked to replace the Massive Retaliation doctrine and proposed, the Strategy of Flexible Response, which would allow the United States the, “capacity to react across the entire spectrum of possible challenges. . . (and). . . the new strategy would recognize that it is just as necessary to deter or win quickly a ‘limited’ war as to deter ‘general’ war” (Taylor: 6).
Much of the same views were pronounced by powerful academicians, such as, Henry Kissinger at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, Roger Hilsman at Columbia University’s Institute of War and Peace Studies and other institutions such as, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies. Furthermore, in 1957 the United States Senate appointed a “Special Committee to Study the Foreign Aid Program” headed by Max Millikan, a former assistant of the Central Intelligence Agency. The group also included many academic and “think tank” strategists. The committee criticized the United States reliance on nuclear weapons and reported to congress the following:
Exclusive focus on Soviet-initiated action ignores the real possibility that the two-thirds of the world’s population outside the Iron Curtain just emerging into political and economic awareness may become an independent source of turbulence and change, and that inter-action among the ‘uncommitted’ countries could overnight threaten the precarious East-West balance” (85th Congress).
Furthermore, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund sponsored a Special Studies Project in 1956 that stated:
Even if we succeed in deterring all-out war by the threat of total annihilation, our country and the rest of the free world remains in peril. . . It is therefore imperative that in addition to our retaliatory force we develop units that can intervene rapidly and that are able to make their power felt with discrimination and versatility (Rockefeller:111-112).
The report also called for the development of a modern airlift and sealift plus mobile forces to be tailored to the “gamut of possible ‘limited’ wars . . .” (Rockefeller: 112).
In his book, The United States in the World Arena, Rostow criticized Massive Retaliation and Eisenhower’s moderate military budget and showed fervent support of the Rockefeller Report of 1956. Similar to Taylor, Rostow felt the United States needed to plan for “bushfire” wars (counterinsurgency) because it was a military weakness of the armed forces (Rostow 1960:319).However, Rostow also pointed out that during the Eisenhower Administration relationships were strained “ . . .between the government as a whole and the scientific community.” Rostow felt that this was due to a lack of direction and money from the Eisenhower Administration which stalled the “nation’s pool of breakthrough talent in science and technology” which also affected adequate research and development in weaponry (Rostow 1960: 311). However, Rostow, Taylor and others knew this would all have to wait until a new administration took office.
Once Kennedy was elected president the Administration immediately adopted Flexible Response as the leading military doctrine and its advocates were appointed to key positions. Maxwell Taylor was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, W.W. Rostow of MIT was a Special Assistant to the President and Robert McNamara was appointed Secretary of Defense. Kennedy showed a personal interest in how the United States would fare in a counterinsurgency war. In the book, To Move A Nation Hilsman remembers:
Kennedy had read Mao on guerrilla warfare and Che Guevara and the others. He let us know of his interest in the subject and started us thinking about it. From the beginning of his administration, the President was convinced that the techniques of ‘revolutionary warfare’ constituted a special kind of threat . . . ‘This is another type of war,’ he told the graduating class of West Point in 1962, ‘new in its intensity, ancient in its origins- war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him . . . It requires in those situations where we must counter it . . . a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training (Hilsman: 415).
The Pentagon was not willing to move quickly in the area of counterinsurgency. As a result, Kennedy decided to set-up the Special Counterinsurgency Program in which the military was but one part. The directors of this program included Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor, the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, his assistant, the Foreign Aid Administrator, the Director of the CIA and the Director of the United States Information Agency (Horowitz: 424). This “special group” planned out a counterinsurgency strategy for United States paramilitary missions in Vietnam, its testing ground, and other Third World countries (Osgood: 44).
The Flexible Response strategy called for a large number of Army ground forces with expanded battlefield mobility. Support for a larger military budget and build-up during peace times had the public hesitant, however, the Special Counterinsurgency Program looked beyond this hesitation and to the political advantages of masking intervention. The plans also insisted on training and equipping indigenous armies.
The Plan’s managers recognized that competing against the straightforward attraction of national liberation movements would require the United States to participate in a psychological warfare operation with the promise of instant escape from underdevelopment. This would be offered as civic action projects and institutional building programs that would offer an alternative to revolutionary socialism. In short, United States imperialism.
The needed tools for counterinsurgency was developed with the newly re-established relationship between the White House and a great number of specialists and scientists from Universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota, private “think tanks”, government agencies , intelligence operatives, linguists, psychologists, corporations, and the weapons designers (NAMRIC: 14). The process that defense planners used in designing and evaluating counterinsurgency weapons systems included the basic guidelines that the weapons had to be effective against decentralized agricultural populations. Moreover, they had to be capable of and prepared for the calibrated response to many insurgency situations, this may range from a localized or low-intensity conflict to an all out “people’s war” as it was in Vietnam. The weapons had to also be available to pro-United States regimes in the underdeveloped countries with the least possible amount of input of United States resources.
After evaluating mistakes made at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and coming off a success with the Cuban Missile Crisis stand-off the Kennedy Administration looked to Vietnam as the proving ground for counterinsurgency. The Kennedy Administration saw Vietnam as the perfect exhibition to prove the United States could stop national revolutions in developing countries. In addressing the United States Committee on Appropriations in 1963 General Maxwell Taylor explained:
(In Vietnam) the United States has a laboratory where (the United States) sees subversive insurgency, the Ho Chi Minh doctrine, being applied in all its forms. This has been a challenge not just for the armed forces, but for several of the agencies of the government, as many of them are involved in one way or another in South Vietnam. On the military side, however, we have recognized the importance of the area as a laboratory. We have had teams out there looking at the equipment requirements of this kind of guerrilla warfare. We have rotated senior officers through there, spending several weeks just to talk to people and get the feel of the operation, so even though not regularly assigned to Vietnam, they are carrying their experience back to their own organizations (88th Congress: 483-44).
Furthermore, when General William Westmoreland addressed the Association for the United States Army in October of 1969 he described Vietnam as a laboratory that has evolved to a “quiet revolution in ground warfare- tactics, techniques, and technology” which would “influence the future direction of our Army both in fundamental concepts of organization and development of equipment” (Association of the United States Army).
Aside from being a laboratory, Vietnam had become a rubbish heap for the trial of new weapons. The United States and the French, “ exploded fifteen million tons of munitions during 1964-1972, twice the amount used in all of Europe and Asia during World War II” (Kolko 1997: 2). The transformation from deterrence to counterinsurgency made way for an upsurge in research, development, and manufacturing of counterinsurgency weapons. As President Johnson stated in his Economic Report of the President Transmitted to the Congress, “The Vietnam build-up virtually assured American businessmen that no economic reverse would occur in the near future” (Johnson 1967).
The Vietnam War was an opportunity for the United States to assume the role of the world’s policeman. However, United States military intervention on behalf of the “free world” governments was hardly a new phenomenon, neither was the anti-Communist rhetoric used to persuade taxpayers of its necessity. At this period of history the decision of intervention cannot be mentioned without a discussion of the weapons used.
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